Observations on the Round of 16

This time it will be much closer

It's been an exciting two weeks of group play, but now we know who is in the knock out rounds. We start things off early Saturday morning with the Uruguay/South Korea match and finish things up on Tuesday with a clash of the Iberian Peninsula.

In commenting on Round of 16, I will rely on two statistical methods for quantifying performance: the Soccernomics model for international matches that relies exclusively on demographic data, and the Footballer-Rating.com method that judges past performance in the tournament. The projected goal differential (Soccernomics) and average player rating by team (Footballer-Rating.com) are shown in the figure below.

Figure 1: Soccernomics and Footballer-Rating.com predictions for the Round of 16. Both scores are differences between the two teams expressed as (Left hand team - Right hand team)

As I mentioned in my last blog post, the United States/Ghana match is the only one where a team has at least a 1.0 goal differential advantage according to the Soccernomics model. Based upon matches with similar projected gaps, the US stands a good chance (11.5/16) to advance. Interestingly enough, the US/Ghana match also shows the biggest gap between the Soccernomics and Footballer predicted performances.

Per the original study that produced the Footballer statistical method, a differential of 0.75 or greater meant that the favored team had 3:1 odds of winning the match. This would mean that Ghana, Argentina, The Netherlands, and Spain are heavy favorites to win their first knockout round matches if they can maintain their group play form.

On the demographic front, there are some interesting points to be made.

• Only 6 of the 16 teams has a GDP per capita less than $10,000, and all but one of those 6 are from Central or South America. Ghana, the poorest country in this year's tournament, is the one sub-$10,000 country not on the American continents.
• At the opposite end, there are 6 teams with a GDP per capita greater than $30,000. This group consists of the four European teams left in the tournament, the US, and Japan.
• Every team in the knockout rounds has played 400 matches or more of international soccer competition. This meant most of the African teams were doomed from the outset, with Ghana being one of the few African teams with the requisite experience to get through group play.

Finally, some commentary on the Germany/England match. This might be the most even match of the Round of 16. Soccernomics says it is dead even, while Footballer-Rating.com has the Germans coring 0.3 points higher on their scale during group play. Perhaps we should just be listening to this octopus after all, because the statistics are clearly a wash on this match.

Happy World Cup watching over the next four days, and go Team USA!