The group stage of the tournament has finished and unfortunately it meant that Finland’s fate was to be the first one of the third-placed teams not to qualify. That didn’t stop us from running the simulation once again for the knockout stage though!
The Knock-outs
The Fifa ranking in brackets after the team.
Belgium (1) – Portugal (5)
Italy (7) – Austria (23)
France (2) – Switzerland (13)
Croatia (14) – Spain (6)
Sweden (18) – Ukraine (24)
England (4) – Germany (12)
Netherlands (16) – Czech Republic (40)
Wales (17) – Denmark (10)
We can see from the rankings that the upper half of the knock-out path seems to provide a more tricky path to the final as the average ranking position is 8.875 compared to the 17.625 of the lower half.
Thus, the teams in the upper half of the knock-out path have taken a dent to their chances for the title, although this has been good news especially for England and Denmark who now are the favourites to play the second semi-final. However, England is facing a tricky last-16 match against Germany immediately.
If they manage to overcome that hurdle, we also expect with a >90% probability an overwhelming increase of “It’s coming home” references from our team’s resident English member… Sorry Patrick 😉
The other first-round blockbuster games are obviously the tournament holders Portugal taking on the top-ranked team Belgium and the previous World Cup runner-up Croatia challenging Spain.
And of course, with any game there is an element of luck, as we can see from Sweden’s first knock-out game! (no offense to our Nordic neighbours).
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