On the eve of the UEFA Euros, historical to Finnish football, we decided to create a simulation of the tournament to find out what kind of success each team could expect from this summer’s football festival.
The company is issuing no warranties (and takes no responsibility for any inflated expectation/hope levels), with these probability estimates 🙂
The model
We used an old and somewhat simple model that one of our analysts built originally for the World Cup 2006, to play out the tournament 1 000 000 times. As the input evaluations of the strengths of the teams are subjective, for lack of a better measurement, this time round we decided to use the FIFA rankings to classify the teams before the start of the tournament. At first we divided the teams into five main categories from A to E and then divided these into three subcategories (eg. A+, A, A-) by ranking points so that a difference in the starting points of hundreds would imply a difference in the main category and each of these hundreds of points are divided into thirds to create the subcategories. This will yield the following ranking (as per FIFA ranking at the start of the tournament):
| Fifa ranking | Country | Fifa coefficient | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BEL | 1783,38 | A+ |
| 2 | FRA | 1757,30 | A |
| 4 | ENG | 1686,78 | B+ |
| 5 | POR | 1666,12 | B |
| 6 | ESP | 1648,13 | B |
| 7 | ITA | 1642,06 | B |
| 10 | DEN | 1631,55 | B- |
| 12 | GER | 1609,12 | B- |
| 13 | SUI | 1606,21 | B- |
| 14 | CRO | 1605,75 | B- |
| 16 | NED | 1598,04 | C+ |
| 17 | WAL | 1570,36 | C+ |
| 18 | SWE | 1569,81 | C |
| 21 | POL | 1549,87 | C |
| 23 | AUT | 1523,42 | C- |
| 24 | UKR | 1514,64 | C- |
| 29 | TUR | 1505,05 | C- |
| 36 | SVK | 1475,24 | D+ |
| 37 | HUN | 1468,75 | D |
| 38 | RUS | 1462,65 | D |
| 40 | CZE | 1458,81 | D |
| 44 | SCO | 1441,43 | D |
| 54 | FIN | 1410,82 | D- |
| 62 | MKD | 1374,73 | E+ |
The Result
| Country | Winning probability | % |
|---|---|---|
| BEL | 20,39 | % |
| FRA | 15,09 | % |
| ENG | 8,84 | % |
| SPA | 6,55 | % |
| ITA | 6,28 | % |
| POR | 6,09 | % |
| DEN | 4,82 | % |
| CRO | 4,71 | % |
| SUI | 4,45 | % |
| GER | 4,24 | % |
| NED | 3,35 | % |
| WAL | 3,02 | % |
| SWE | 2,14 | % |
| POL | 2,12 | % |
| UKR | 1,54 | % |
| AUT | 1,51 | % |
| TUR | 1,31 | % |
| SVK | 0,90 | % |
| CZE | 0,57 | % |
| RUS | 0,56 | % |
| SCO | 0,56 | % |
| HUN | 0,46 | % |
| FIN | 0,31 | % |
| MKD | 0,18 | % |
Belgium and France seem to get an advantage from their tough groups, since by surviving their group they are going to avoid their group opponents until the semifinal stage. Furthermore, if they win their group they will be guaranteed to face a team coming into the playoffs as a third place finisher in their group, which will give them a higher chance to reach at least the quarter finals than facing a runner-up of another group. These outright favourites will then be followed by a range of teams that are quite close in strengths to each other implying final rounds for the tournament depending on the knockout bracket.
How will The Eagle-owls do?
| Points | Probability | % |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 15,07 | % |
| 1 | 20,42 | % |
| 2 | 8,52 | % |
| 3 | 22,86 | % |
| 4 | 17,34 | % |
| 5 | 3,18 | % |
| 6 | 8,62 | % |
| 7 | 3,06 | % |
| 9 | 0,94 | % |
The team will qualify from the group stage with a 44,6% probability, reach the quarter-finals with a 13,77% probability, the semifinal with a 4,5% probability and the final with 1,3% probability.
The probability for a big gathering at Senaatintori (where Finn’s go to celebrate big sporting wins) with the trophy would be 0,31%.
Be sure to check back with us to see how the simulation compares to the reality 🙂