Quem vai ganhar a Copa?

Goldman Sachs Predicts the World Cup Winner 

"... which team will win the tournament?
Hosts Brazil, according to Goldman SachsGS +1.00%, which has crunched lots of numbers. Lots and lots of numbers (Dominic Wilson and Jan Hatzius from Goldman Sachs’s economics team joke that they wish staff showed the same level of dedication for their day jobs.)

Here’s Goldman explaining the methodology:

“The predictions for each match are based on a regression analysis that uses the entire history of mandatory international football matches—i.e., no friendlies—since 1960. This gives us about 14,000 observations to estimate the coefficients of our model. The dependent variable in the regression analysis is the number of goals scored by each side in each match. Following the literature on modelling football matches, we assume that the number of goals scored by a particular side in a particular match follows a Poisson distribution.”

Brazil stands out as the clear favorite according to Goldman Sachs, well ahead of even reigning champion Spain. Cameroon, Japan and Honduras on the other hand might as well give up now, according to the Goldman data. The actual odds also favor Brazil although the gap with other teams is less stark than in Goldman’s model.
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