Microsoft’s Excel Tool Predicts A Very Predictable Winner For the World Cup, But You Can Change It

Jun. 14, 2018

But don’t worry if you cannot afford tohire Goldman Sachs, or get a chance to ask the closest octopus about the results personally. Thanks to predictive analysis,you can now predict the winner of the World Cupor at least be able to make a safe bet. All you need is zeal for football and some understanding of MS Excel, and Microsoft has got your covered.

Engineers at Microsoft have created an Excel file and pre-programmed the parameters topredict the winner of the matchesand the whole tournament. This involves ranking the teams based on theirperformance in international matches over the last 40 years.

This also means that the program only considers the performance of the entire team and not individual players, so if you’re depending on anew star performerto rescue the team, the program might not predict it very accurately (but you can adjust that and we’ll get to it in a bit)

The program usesPoisson Distributionto determine the probability of a team scoring a goal during a match. Another formula uses Elo’s Football ratings to determine the expectancy of a team winning a game.

But you can change the parameters used by increasing or decreasing from the baseline set by the developers. If you have a different opinion on how to rank the teams,you can adjust the performance tickerin the second sheet, based on your expectation.

If you think a team will perform better than what has been coded, you can increase the percentage, while if think a competitor to perform worse, you can add a negative value. These are some example changes we made:

Not according to you? Go ahead anddownload this fileand change the parameters (press F9 after you make the changes to have them reflect) to find out the odds of your team winning. Here’s a look at the tail end of the tournament according to our picks.