The giant squid known as Goldman Sachs jammed its blood funnel into Euro 2016 last weekend by producing a mathematical model for predicting the outcome of the championships.
The producers of the model, Jan Hatzius, Jari Stehn and Donnie Millar, humbly acknowledge that football tournaments are 'stochastic' events, meaning they are unpredictable due to interference from random variables.
They have borrowed the ELO rating employed to rank chess players and applied it to the 24 competing teams. It is not quite that straightforward as Germany boast the highest ELO rating but are not backed to win the competition.
The ELO rating is ascribed to a team based on statistical factors such as how many goals they've scored in the last ten games, how many they've conceded, home advantage, and performance in the European championships generally, or as the statisticians put this last one, 'A Euro Cup dummy to capture whether a team does systematically better at Euro Cups than in other competitive matches'.
Here is the mixed report on the outcome of their model as it was applied to the 2014 World Cup.
... our model failed to anticipate the elimination of heavyweights Spain and Italy in the group stage and gave Brazil a 48% probability of winning the trophy. More encouragingly, it identified three of the four semifinalists before the start of the tournament, and the fully updated version predicted the winner of every match in the knockout stage except for the 7-1 semifinal between Germany and Brazil.
While the world at large has shown more interest in the news that France are deemed favourites and England are tipped to reach the semi-final, we want to first analyse Ireland.
The news is surprisingly good here.
Ireland are deemed to have a 62.5% chance of reaching the second round phase, which is 4.2% better than Sweden's oddly enough. And only a few percentage points behind Italy, whose current travails are reflected in their mid-table ranking.
Our chances of winning at very minimal, although not quite as minimal as our Northern brethren. We are at 1.1% while the Nordies are down at 0.1%.
