Boffins at McCann Erickson have calculated that if England were playing in Euro 2008, they would have beaten Portugal in the Final to lift the trophy.
A team of experts (with far too much time on their hands) has been compiling the information at the company’s Cheshire office and fed it into a very complicated computer programme and that was the result.
Sceptics may say; how can they prove this when England aren’t even in the competition? Well Mark Emmett and his team have really put their necks on the line and have also predicted the real winner.
So get the bookmaker on the phone, because according to McCann......... Spain will play Portugal in the Final and Spain will run out winners. In addition they reckon France won’t even make it past the group stages.
Any complaints and lost money should be directed to McCann and Mark Emmett:
Euro 08
“We plan to update the model with actual results throughout the tournament too and see how our predictions shape up as well as making new predictions. Normally we develop this type of model to help clients predict which brands consumers are most likely to purchase based on certain stimuli and conditions.
"We thought it would be a bit of fun to build a model, but were genuinely surprised that it predicted Spain as favourites as opposed to the bookies’ favourite Germany. But we were truly surprised when we replaced Russia with England to find that 42 years of hurt would have ended this summer.”
Are you sitting comfortably? Well, here comes the science bit… The model uses time weighted historical game information that goes back over the entire history of the European Championships to generate attack and defence parameters for each country. It also includes an element of weighting designed to replicate the form of each team immediately prior to the tournament to ensure current recent performances are factored in.
There is a home advantage rating applied to Austria and Switzerland which has been calculated using all of the historical data, controlling for how good the nation was at football and then calculating their uplift from being a home nation.
The model, which contains several thousand lines of software code then calculates a distribution of goals likely for the two teams in a match. This distribution is then converted into the likelihood of each team to win, lose or draw a match.
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