Many, many people have tried to make predictions with the World Cup getting underway and the competition looking wide-open. We ourselves have also made several predictions for the whole tournament from the winner, to who we think will score the most goals. 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 64 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. Additionally, any game’s that were a draw, they were then re-rolled to allow for a team to progress ‘in extra time” if you wish’.

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.Netherlands 2nd.Qatar 3rd.Senegal 4th.Ecuador

Group B: 1st.England 2nd.Iran 3rd.USA 4th.Wales

Group C: 1st.Saudi Arabia 2nd.Argentina 3rd.Poland 4th.Mexico

Group D: 1st.France 2nd.Australia 3rd.Tunisia 4th.Denmark

Group E: 1st.Japan 2nd.Spain 3rd.Germany 4th.Costa Rica

Group F: 1st.Morocco 2nd.Canada 3rd.Croatia 4th.Belgium

Group G: 1st.Brazil 2nd.Cameroon 3rd.Serbia 4th.Switzerland

Group H: 1st.Portgual 2nd.Ghana 3rd.South Korea 4th.Uruguay

Round Of 16

Netherlands 3-1 Iran

Saudi Arabia 4-6 Australia

Japan 2-1 Canada

Brazil 4-5 Ghana

England 5-2 Qatar

France 3-6 Argentina

Morocco 2-4 Spain

Portugal 6-1 Cameroon

Quarter Finals

Netherlands 3-4 Australia

Japan 3-2 Ghana

England 3-6 Argentina

Spain 2-5 Portugal

Semi Finals

Australia 4-6 Japan

Argentina 3-1 Portugal

Final

Japan 2-5 Argentina