How predictable are the FIFA worldcup football outcomes? An empirical analysis

Abstract

Since 1993 the Federation of International Football Association's (FIFA) monthly world ranking system for senior national football teams has become a reliable source to judge a team's potentiality in football. In the past four FIFA worldcup football tournaments from 1994 to 2006, the top seeded team never won the FIFA worldcup except in 1994 when Brazil won as the number one team. This article examines the strength of this element of uncertainty in FIFA worldcup using two empirical models. We find empirical evidence of the fact that in spite of the number of cases of surprise upsets from the lower ranked teams or poor performance by the top seeded teams; overall the results are strongly in favour of the higher ranked teams.

Notes

¹ In 2002 the FIFA world cup final match was viewed by 218 million sports fans all over the world, which was on the top of most watched sports events list, from 2002 to 2005.

² Gratton et al. (2000) reported that major sports events a part of tourism strategy for major cities; see Jones et al. (2000) analysed the attendance in British Rugby league; (Guis and Johnson, 2000) discussed wage discrimination in professional basketball; (Guis and Johnson, 2000) analysed the effect of race on compensation in professional football.

³ Previous FIFA world cup links: http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/06/en/p/pwc/index.html. The official site for FIFA world cup in Germany: http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/06/en/

⁴ Since the final round FIFA worldcup usually starts in the month of June, we considered the rank in May. Please refer to Appendix for rankings of all the teams participated in the final round of FIFA worldcup.