Simon Kuper’s World Cup: Who will win?

{"text":[[{"start":5.65,"text":"“Who will win the World Cup?”"}],[{"start":7.800000000000001,"text":"The question is often asked as if a true football insider or statistical whizz should know, but in fact it’s unanswerable. The current favourites, France and Spain, could easily trip up. A football World Cup is one of the most unpredictable events in sport. All anyone can do is indicate certain predictive patterns. "}],[{"start":27.1,"text":"More than most sports, football favours the underdog. A study by Eli Ben-Naim of Los Alamos National Laboratory and other physicists in 2006 analysed over a century’s worth of match results, and found that in English football the underdog won 45 per cent of the time, compared with about 36 per cent in basketball and American gridiron football. The main reason is the scarcity of goals in soccer. A weak team can defend all match, get lucky once and win, whereas in other ballgames there are so many attacks that stronger teams can compensate for a random setback."}],[{"start":66.25,"text":"Still, in a football league, played over 38 or so matches, the strongest team (usually the one with the highest salaries) tends to finish top. But the World Cup’s format favours randomness. This time, there are five knockout rounds, including the final. Most of these games will be won by a single goal or penalty shoot-outs, meaning that luck often decides. "}],[{"start":88.15,"text":"Contrast this with Wimbledon, also a knockout tournament. An underdog might take a set off men’s favourite Jannik Sinner, an amazing achievement — but he’d still need to win two more sets to beat him. That gives Sinner ample chance to recover. No wonder bookmakers make him the 8-15 odds-on favourite for Wimbledon (implying about a two in three probability of winning), whereas Spain are 5-1 against to win the World Cup (implying a one-in-six chance). Spain in 2010 were the last favourites who went on to win the tournament, note statisticians Nate Silver and Joseph George. "}],[{"start":121.4,"text":"But there are historical patterns that predict success. One is geography. All but one of the countries that reached the winners’ podium — that is, first, second or third place — in World Cups since 2006 are European. Six come from western Europe, with only Croatia from just across the old Iron Curtain. Football is a dance in space — expanding it when you have the ball, shrinking it when you don’t — and Europeans have best mastered the geometry. The rest of humanity in that period has produced just one team that can match them: Lionel Messi’s Argentina. In short, the strongest prior assumption is a western European winner. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":161.60000000000002,"text":"France look to be the leading candidates. They reached four of the last seven World Cup finals, winning two and losing two only on penalties. They top Fifa men’s rankings. They have a breathtaking front four in Kylian Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé, Michael Olise and Rayan Cherki, meaning goals can come from many sources."}],[{"start":181.90000000000003,"text":"Spain is arguably the strongest football nation of the century. It is only fractionally behind France in the men’s rankings and tops the women’s rankings, while Spanish men’s clubs and national teams won all 27 finals they played in from 2002 to May 2025. However, their best attacker, 18-year-old Lamine Yamal, has struggled with injuries probably caused by overplaying. He’s now recovering from a hamstring problem. Playing eight games in just over a month could be a stretch."}],[{"start":210.20000000000005,"text":"England, Brazil and Portugal probably rank a touch behind France and Spain. "}],[{"start":215.50000000000006,"text":"Argentina are reigning champions, but that’s often a disadvantage. Four of the past six champions exited the next tournament in the first round, often because they continued to rely on fading heroes. Argentina risk falling into that trap. Messi remains football’s most gifted player but turns 39 this month, is struggling with muscle fatigue and injury, and plays for Inter Miami, who lost 4-0 in their last rare outing against a top team, Paris Saint-Germain in last year’s World Club Cup. Other Argentine stalwarts such as Rodrigo De Paul, Nicolás Tagliafico and Leandro Paredes have also passed 30 and play in lesser leagues. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":255.15000000000006,"text":"Romantics would love to see a team from one of football’s underdog continents win — Africa, Asia or North and Central America. It probably won’t happen. The sports economist Stefan Szymanski and I show in our book Soccernomics that teams from these continents improved for a while against teams from Europe and South America, but then stagnated — the Africans from 1990, North and Central Americans from the early 2000s and Asians from about 2010. The most advanced tactics, especially pressing, remain a western European domain. True, Morocco reached the semi-finals in 2022 but did so with many players recruited from its western European diaspora. The most plausible contender from another continent is Japan, unbeaten in nine matches against Europeans. "}],[{"start":303.30000000000007,"text":"Hosts won five of the first 11 World Cups, but none has even reached the final this century. This time, two of the three hosts, Mexico and Canada, will lose home advantage from the quarter-finals on, when all games will be in the US. And the Americans have stagnated for 20 years, never regaining their peak Fifa ranking of fourth in 2006. That may be because they shifted towards playing more games against teams from their region, rather than European and South American countries, reducing their opportunities to learn best practice. The US have lost nine consecutive games against European teams. In this tournament, they would do well to equal the quarter-final place achieved in their previous home World Cup in 1994. "}],[{"start":345.1500000000001,"text":"If any dark horse can win this tournament, the most likely candidate could be Norway — based in the strongest region and blessed with Erling Haaland’s goalscoring. Could they do it? In World Cups, follow the dictum of Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman on predicting which films will be hits: “Nobody knows anything.” "}],[{"start":370.6500000000001,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1781438579_6610.mp3"}