Everyone can go home, Brazil is going to win this year's World Cup
No (soccer) balls have been kicked yet in the upcoming World Cup but it seems that Brazil are already confirmed to be taking home the golden trophy.
You may think that picking five-time winners Brazil to win in a football tournament, held on their home ground, is a bit of a no-brainer, but we're just quoting people who are supposed be brainy!
Their impending win has all been predicted by none other than investment bank Goldman Sachs and Stephen Hawking.
Last week, Goldman Sachs stuck out their neck and predicted that the Brazilians will - apologies for the football cliche coming up - samba their way to be the trophy.
The Goldman Sachs report, into its fifth edition in this year's World Cup, comprehensively details out how exactly they were able to predict that Brazil is going to win the World Cup:
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
There were so confident of their methodology that they applied their model on the 2010 World Cup and the were able to correctly predict 13 of the 16 teams that advanced to the knockout stages.
Echoing Goldman Sachs was Hawking, the theoretical physicist who also does the occasional cameo on The Simpsons, who also predicted that Brazil is going to win because "hosts have won over 30% of the World Cup".
So if you want to bet on the winner, two big names have come out to say that Brazil are going to win it.
In all probability, this will happen this year.
Sources: Goldman Sachs, Paddy Power
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