What Goldman Sachs Predicts about Greece in the World Cup

The report forecasts that Greece has close to zero chances to win the 2014 World Cup and that most probably Brazil will top the tournament. However “Greece is not to be written off (in football).”

In a recent report, experts at America’s investment banking firm Goldman Sachs have predicted the outcome of FIFA World Cup 2014.

“We present this guide as a companion to the upcoming Rio Cup, with the usual unnatural mix of football and economics,” wrote Goldman.

The report forecasts that Brazil would win the 2014 World Cup, and that Argentina, Germany and Spain have the highest probability of reaching the semifinals. At the 2010 World Cup, Goldman had also picked Brazil to win, but Spain emerged as the champion.

Here’s Goldman’s prognostics:

Here’s Goldman explaining the methodology:

“The predictions for each match are based on a regression analysis that uses the entire history of mandatory international football matches—i.e., no friendlies—since 1960. This gives us about 14,000 observations to estimate the coefficients of our model. The dependent variable in the regression analysis is the number of goals scored by each side in each match. Following the literature on modelling football matches, we assume that the number of goals scored by a particular side in a particular match follows a Poisson distribution.”

And this is how they say the knockout stages will pan out:

After Experts at Goldman analyzed each team’s history, world cup performances, and overall characteristics they believe that Brazil will win the World Cup giving its team 48.5% chances. Meanwhile, Argentina’s team has 14.1% probability and Germany holds 11.4% probability of winning the tournament. According to the Goldman Sachs analysis Greece has 0,3% chances to win the World Cup but the Greek team is “Not to be written off (in football)”  .

Here is the full report on Greece as it conducted by Themos Fiotakis for Goldman Sachs:

The 20th FIFA World Cup begins on June 12 and ends on July 13. Participating in the tournament are teams of 31 nations along with Brazil. A total of 64 matches will take place in 12 cities of Brazil. The first game for Greece is against Colombia on June 14.