FIFA 2018: Why Goldman Sachs is predicting that Brazil will lift this year’s Cup

Looking into the future, especially when it comes to football, is risky business. Whether you’re a successful clairvoyant like Paul the Octopus—who, during the 2010 World Cup, correctly predicted the winners of 12 out of 14 matches—or an investment bank like Goldman Sachs (GS), which predicts that Brazil will lift this year’s World Cup, people will remember you if you get things right, and (kindly) forget you if you don’t. But football, a durational event that’s really about controlling chaos—of the ball as well of the moving players on the field—is trickier.

Nonetheless, what matters is your taste of scientific methodology. GS ran 2,00,000 models, mining data on team and individual player attributes, to forecast specific match scores. Then, it simulated 1 million variations of the tournament to calculate the probability of advancement for each squad. As it happens, Brazil came up as the winner.

Never mind that GS had predicted Brazil as the winner last time in 2014 too—even though they crashed out after losing against ultimate winner Germany 1-7 in the semi-final. But then, a mathematical model, for some people, will always be more dependable than an octopus. And regardless of the fact that Germany’s Commerzbank ran its own model—which put Germany as the favourites.