Predicting EURO 2016 results

Sat, 21 May 2016 00:51:33 +0200

With less than a month left until the European championship and some free time, I built a simple simulation to predict the results of the tournament. You can find the whole code and run it yourself on results. There are some noticeable differences with the odds from sportsbooks, although nothing out of the ordinary.

The simulation

If you are not interested in how the simulation works, feel free skip all the boring bits and go directly to the results.

The idea is quite simple: create or use and existing model to predict the results of football games; stick the results of the games in the tournament and find out the winner. Repeat lots of times and find out the probability of each team winning the tournament.

Luckily, people already created ways to rank and predict results of two-players games. The most known one is the

Predicting draws

If you have a closer look at the . So I am will use the same method, sumarised by this formula:

Tie-breaker

The Euro 2016 has comprehensive France

Being the host, France have an automatic place in the tournament and did not play in the qualification round. As a result their rating variations for the last two years is based solely on friendly matches. Thus their rating might not be a true representation of their strength as some national teams use friendlies as a trial for new players and strategies.

They also get a 100 points boost for being the host nation which allows them to overtake Germany as the team with the highest rating.

Results

The table bellow shows the percentage of the teams reaching each round of the competition. The value are rounded to two non-zero digits, but shows the real value on hover.

You can sort the table based on any column, just by clicking on the header. This is done by the toggle red-green scaled coloring of the cells

You can also download the raw table in csv format and open it in Excel, LibreOffice Calc or other compatible software.

Team	Elo		4+	3+	2+	1st	1/16	1/8	1/4	Final	Win
France	2047	A	1.0	0.985004	0.926749	0.746216	0.952993	0.774739	0.612210	0.407821	0.278695
Germany	2037	C	1.0	0.980305	0.902630	0.690674	0.937810	0.779634	0.572565	0.375420	0.250762
Spain	1977	D	1.0	0.935071	0.805860	0.563105	0.873594	0.647535	0.416696	0.265685	0.139537
England	1934	B	1.0	0.950894	0.838690	0.603733	0.895695	0.641500	0.383712	0.207418	0.096680
Portugal	1885	F	1.0	0.929710	0.789575	0.528687	0.863494	0.521821	0.268633	0.128776	0.051332
Belgium	1896	E	1.0	0.879272	0.689884	0.413902	0.796458	0.468432	0.242255	0.117500	0.050782
Italy	1844	E	1.0	0.821404	0.583775	0.292684	0.728002	0.374079	0.174660	0.074686	0.026124
Ukraine	1797	C	1.0	0.837086	0.523354	0.160413	0.727565	0.353468	0.153930	0.057359	0.016305
Turkey	1797	D	1.0	0.736112	0.446130	0.168860	0.639014	0.294287	0.121496	0.045218	0.013254
Croatia	1794	D	1.0	0.731955	0.440093	0.165836	0.635075	0.289824	0.118998	0.043727	0.012746
Austria	1766	F	1.0	0.815466	0.560995	0.245197	0.720611	0.317919	0.110981	0.036471	0.009730
Poland	1762	C	1.0	0.792649	0.436689	0.123085	0.676813	0.288182	0.113812	0.037730	0.009445
Switzerland	1753	A	1.0	0.798865	0.473614	0.119873	0.697749	0.286300	0.111156	0.036467	0.008500
Russia	1747	B	1.0	0.774350	0.486253	0.178624	0.677017	0.291799	0.094960	0.028001	0.007051
Romania	1738	A	1.0	0.777445	0.434642	0.106259	0.673352	0.260676	0.096251	0.030158	0.006543
Ireland	1751	E	1.0	0.666861	0.378780	0.154792	0.570381	0.215792	0.079554	0.025212	0.005894
Sweden	1735	E	1.0	0.632463	0.347561	0.138622	0.540088	0.192738	0.067656	0.020408	0.004538
Slovakia	1715	B	1.0	0.719799	0.410848	0.140172	0.621306	0.235524	0.068353	0.017892	0.004009
Czech Republic	1728	D	1.0	0.596862	0.307917	0.102199	0.511493	0.183821	0.061426	0.017769	0.003865
Hungary	1671	F	1.0	0.654336	0.347105	0.123371	0.558812	0.171308	0.042631	0.009772	0.001788
Iceland	1647	F	1.0	0.600488	0.302325	0.102745	0.511338	0.141583	0.032208	0.006823	0.001096
Wales	1638	B	1.0	0.554957	0.264209	0.077471	0.475025	0.129330	0.027976	0.005346	0.000862
Albania	1578	A	1.0	0.438686	0.164995	0.027652	0.380767	0.075887	0.014787	0.002438	0.000258
Northern Ireland	1578	C	1.0	0.389960	0.137327	0.025828	0.335548	0.063822	0.013094	0.001903	0.000204

Who should I bet on?

Whoever you want! This is just a simple simulation based on the Elo rankings. There is no guarantee that this model is right or even close to being right. There are probably

Basically if the tournament is repeated thousands of times and you make the same £1 bet each time, this is how many pounds you will get back on average. Same as the previous one, this table is sortable and the numbers are rounded, but you can get the exact value on hover.

Team	Winning probability	Best odd	Expected outcome
Ukraine	0.016305	101.0	1.6468050
Romania	0.006543	251.0	1.6422930
France	0.278695	4.5	1.2541275
Germany	0.250762	5.0	1.2538100
Portugal	0.051332	23.0	1.1806360
Turkey	0.013254	81.0	1.0735740
England	0.096680	10.0	0.9668000
Spain	0.139537	6.5	0.9069905
Ireland	0.005894	151.0	0.8899940
Hungary	0.001788	401.0	0.7169880
Belgium	0.050782	12.0	0.6093840
Slovakia	0.004009	151.0	0.6053590
Switzerland	0.008500	67.0	0.5695000
Russia	0.007051	71.0	0.5006210
Italy	0.026124	19.0	0.4963560
Czech Republic	0.003865	126.0	0.4869900
Poland	0.009445	51.0	0.4816950
Sweden	0.004538	101.0	0.4583380
Croatia	0.012746	34.0	0.4333640
Austria	0.009730	41.0	0.3989300
Iceland	0.001096	126.0	0.1380960
Albania	0.000258	501.0	0.1292580
Northern Ireland	0.000204	501.0	0.1022040
Wales	0.000862	81.0	0.0698220

Looking at the British islands: Betting on Northern Ireland and Wales is a very bad deal. The betting companies might be trying to profit from patriotic fans. However, the outcome for bets on England or Ireland is reasonable, which partially dismisses the argument.

The best outcome is for Ukraine with an expected profit of 65%. Its possible to do the same calculations for reaching any other round of the tournament (e.g. final, semi-finals, play-off rounds) and see if there is an even better bet.

The only other countries that makes sense to bet on are Romania, France, Germany, Portugal and Turkey. These teams together have over a 60% chance of winning the tournament, not bad options after all.

The betting companies most likely have more advanced models and you should not take anything from here seriously.

Hello World!

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 23:51:33 +0100

Welcome to my home on the web. After owning this domain for almost 5 years, I finally decided to start writing a blog. But why? Sometime ago, I was complaining to a friend that I find it very hard to write and express my thoughts. Instead of taking pity, she suggested that I should regularly write something.

So here it is! A place where I can write about stuff I know and care like technology, programming and myself. For now, I am planning to publish a new post each month. But, who knows? This might as well be last post I ever write, sitting here and showing my failure.

If you enjoy reading bad quality and highly subjective essays about topics you probably don’t care about then this blog is for you. It even has a RSS feed, which I didn’t actually bother testing it, so it might [or might not] work. If you aren’t using RSS you probably should, however, I will also tweet about new content, so you could .

All the content is stored on Amazon AWS servers somewhere in Ireland. Additionally, the pages are also cached in servers all over the world (edge-locations) to improve the time it takes your browser to load it. And all of this cost only a couple of cents a month. Quite amazing!

Alex Grigoroi