“The most important of all the Unimportant Forecasts” is how investment research firm BCA Research describes it. guess for the FIFA World Cup 2022 starting next month in Qatar.
But for a certain South American country, winning the championship is an obsession for the whole country. And those citizens will be pleased with what the BCA has to say.
Argentina will win the World Cup against Portugal in the final, according to its logic. Reasoning? It is highly likely that the final match will end in a penalty shootout, and Argentina has a historic advantage in both experience and record.
If accurate, that means two of the greatest players in the world, Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, will duel on the field.
“Choosing between Messi and Ronaldo is like choosing between Mozart and Beethoven or between Da Vinci and Michelangelo – it is not a matter of objective analysis and more a matter of taste,” the BCA researchers wrote. “Cannot rely on cold numerical logic and hard data”.
Aside from the potential penalty shootout advantage, the researchers say Argentina hasn’t lost a game since July 2019, so the team will enter the World Cup as a “much hotter team”.
Regarding the record, neither Messi nor Ronaldo won the World Cup.
The BCA concluded that Argentina will win based on what it calls “a unique two-step model that combines macro and micro variables as well as ourselves.” play football“Includes mining a database of player statistics from the FIFA video game simulation. The researchers started by forecasting group stage matches using data such as the team’s average player ratings and past team performance. They then move on to the knockout stages, using similar calculations, while also including variables like “winner’s curse”—the historical unlikely that a team will repeat as the winner. How to be a champion. That means France has been fined in terrible numbers for winning the 2018 World Cup.
However, Argentina’s victory is still only a prediction. And predictions are never certain.
“How confident are we about our selection for the winner? While we are happy with our pick, Argentina will face many close matches throughout the knockout stages, with the final being essentially a coin toss,” the BCA researchers wrote. . “So their probability of winning the cup is only 7%, even the favorite team.”
Predicting World Cup results is a fairly new BCA tradition. Its first attempt was in 2018.
when researchers predicted – incorrectly – that Spain would win.
Since then, BCA has added new variables to its calculations, and adjusted its methodology and analysis more broadly. This endeavor is supposed to be a fun and much-needed break for researchers of the world’s economic affairs.
“We hope this report provides a much-needed respite from bear markets in risk assets, angry hawks, and decades-high inflation,” the BCA wrote in the report. and the war in Ukraine,” the BCA wrote in the report.
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