Many, many people have tried to make predictions with the Euros getting underway and the competition looking wide-open. We ourselves have also made several predictions for the whole tournament (in a previous post in particular). However, this is cup football, and one thing we must understand in football and sport in general, is that in knockout cup football anybody can pull of an upset and beat anyone. In the 90 minutes, shock results, underdog tales and crumbling giants can all occur. So, although there are clear favourites and higher quality sides, some of the game comes down to chance.

With that thought in mind, I have decided to work through the entire tournament purely down to chance. To do this, I have run incredibly statistical simulations for all 51 games to work out the entire tournament. When I say statistical simulations, what I mean is that I rolled a dice for each team to score the games. So, for each time, the dice roll represented the number of goals scored from 1-6. I understand that not every game has both teams scoring, and this method limits teams to just 6 goals, however as you will see, it gives some great results along the way. For the group stages, I ran through each game of each group, however I have only logged the final group standings rather than every game, but rest assured that the dice was rolled and recorded for each game.

Honestly, as ridiculous of a method for predicting a tournament this is and sounds, the results are quite surprisingly realistic, and along the way it predicts some big upsets and high-scoring games.

So, let us know over on Twitter (@NextGoalWinBlog) what you think of our predictions, and if you have tried this yourself, let us know, we would love to compare.

Enjoy.

Group Stages

Group A: 1st.Turkey 2nd.Switzerland 3rd.Italy 4th.Wales

Group B: 1st.Russia 2nd.Belgium 3rd.Denmark 4th.Finland

Group C: 1st.Netherlands 2nd.Austria 3rd.Ukraine 4th.North Macedonia

Group D: 1st.England 2nd.Scotland 3rd.Czech Republic 4th.Croatia

Group E: 1st.Poland 2nd.Slovakia 3rd.Spain 4th.Sweden

Group F: 1st.Germany 2nd.Portugal 3rd.France 4th.Hungary

3rd Place Qualification: Italy, Denmark, Czech Republic, Spain

Round Of 16

Switzerland 2-3 Belgium

Netherlands 1-2 Czech Republic

Scotland 6-4 Slovakia

England 3-1 Portugal

Turkey 6-5 Austria

Russia 4 -5 Spain

Germany 1-2 Italy

Poland 2-1 Denmark

Quarter Finals

Scotland 3-1 Italy

Spain 6-1 Turkey

Czech Republic 3-2 Belgium

England 5-3 Poland

Semi Finals

Czech Republic 4-2 Scotland

England 3-5 Spain

Final

Czech Republic 2-4 Spain