Predicting World Cup Matches with Neural Networks (2018)
The FIFA World Cup is the holy grail of global sports, but football has so far resisted the statistical revolution that has swept across American sports in the last two decades. Building on top of two existing ranking models, we developed several classification models of different types to make predictions on World Cup data. Our results show that even complex mathematical models have a hard time over-performing Las Vegas odds and that abstaining from ever predicting draws seems like an optimal strategy.