2007-12-03 - 2008 European Championship - Draw
For the second time in a week there was a major championship draw to enjoy. This time it was the turn of the Euro 2008 hopefuls to find out who they'll need to beat next summer. As usual it was very interesting to see how the seedings played their part in creating a nightmare for some, and a relatively easier group stage for others.
Group A
Switzerland will have a very tough time of it next summer with Portugal and the Czech Republic, and in Turkey, on the cards the weakest team in the group, they have an opponent who will want revenge for what happened in the 2006 World Cup qualifying playoffs when the Swiss beat the Turks on away goals. Of course we all know the problems that occurred after the bitter match. Although Portugal and the Czech Republic are the strongest on paper, I think home advantage for the Swiss might just tell and I'll predict them to make the quarter finals along with the Czech Republic.
Group B
I think there is no doubt now that Austria is going to join Belgium in being the only European Championship host to have not made the quarter finals, unless some very strange things happen between now and the summer. In Germany, Croatia and Poland the Austrians really have opponents that already have excellent qualifying campaigns behind them. For Germany and Austria there will be memories of an awful moment in world football when in 1982 the two conspired to fix a result that left the whole Algerian nation cry foul. After an early goal for the West Germans, both decided to play out the match without much further effort because both teams knew they would qualify for the second round, with Algeria having already finished their match. It lead to a change in tournament organization whereby final group matches would be played at the same time so as to lessen the chances of teams fixing a result. Although Poland are a very decent side, I can't see anyone other than Croatia and Germany progressing from this group. One thing that's almost for sure is that the Germans should at least end their 6-game losing streak (3 draws, 3 losses) in European Championship finals matches following their golden goal win in the 1996 final.
Group C
This is perhaps one of the toughest groups of death ever. The defending World Champions Italy and the runners up France head a group with the Netherlands and Romania. Perhaps the happiest of the managers is Marco van Basten who knows even getting knocked out after the first round won't exactly hurt because with such quality in the other teams his Dutch team won't be expected to progress. Indeed Romania, seen as the 'weakest' in the group, topped the Netherlands in their qualifying group by three points. It could therefore be argued that a team full of young talent that has at least made the quarter finals in the last 5 tournaments, and made the semis on three other occasions and won in 1988, will start out as underdogs in this group. Still, I think the order of the matches might still help the Netherlands who will meet both Italy and France before playing Romania. Although they might already have been eliminated before their third game, if they are not and they win their final game they have a good chance of progressing if they can find their scoring boots because they should know before the match what is needed to progress, although there's always the possibility that Italy and France, who also play each other on the final group day, might conspire to eliminate the Dutch depending on the results in the group. I don't know why but I don't think France and Italy will progress from this group. If I had to bet for my life I would bet on Italy and the Netherlands to progress, with the nervous-looking Domenech complaining that he's been robbed by the UEFA draw and other issues.
Group D
Just like Group C this is another group containing three former European Championship winners. Spain should be favorites to progress and might already be looking at who out of Group C they'll meet in the potential quarter final but with European Champions Greece who had another strong qualification campaign, upcoming Russia under surpremo coach Guus Hiddink, and the strong Swedish side they may very easily find themselves on the first plane home yet again. This is probably the most difficult of all groups to call with each team having a reasonable chance of progressing. If I had to make a call I'd say Spain and Greece to progress.
Quarter Finals and beyond
This tournament is peculiar in the way the final phase has been organized. Normally both semi finals are reachable by all groups, but for some reason in this tournament one semi final can only be reached by teams from group A & B, and the other only by teams from group C & D. This means that teams that have already played each other in the group phase can play each other again in the semi finals, rather than just in the final as was the case in 2004, 2000 and 1996. This is definitely a big bonus for the teams drawn in group A & B because there's just 2 former champions in those groups, opposed to the 6 former champions in groups C & D. This already means that we can't have a repeat of the 2006 World Cup final between Italy and France. If my predictions work out, we should see the quarter finals Czech Republic v Croatia, Germany v Switzerland, Italy v Greece and Spain v Netherlands. For the semis I'd then go for Germany v Croatia and Italy v Spain. On experience I'd then put the Germans in the final against the Italians, with the Germans getting revenge for the 2006 World Cup semi final loss to Italy in extra time. I'm sure everyone will have different opinions though, so the only way to resolve matters is to revisit this article after the finals take place in just 7 months time.
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Post A Comment!
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2007-12-03 - Championship Probabilities |
| Posted by roger64 |
Hi,
I simulated the tournament 10,000 times, and took a look at who bacame champion. I took the team's strengths from www.eloratings.net.
This is what happened:
Italy 19.70%
France 15.02%
Germany 11.91%
Spain 11.86%
Czech Republic 9.66%
Croatia 6.46%
Switzerland 6.32%
Netherlands 6.06%
Portugal 4.00%
Romania 3.09%
Greece 2.00%
Turkey 1.16%
Sweden 1.03%
Poland 0.91%
Russia 0.70%
Austria 0.12%
Apparently, Italy and France don't suffer too much from the Group of Death. My fellow countrymen (the Dutch), however, do, being 4th on the European ranking (again according to eloratings), but only 8th in this list.. |
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2007-12-04 - Semis |
| Posted by SwedeinFrance |
I very much dislike the tournament system where groups A&B play on one half of the knock-out tree and C&D on the other. I suspect that the reason is to make the number of resting days as equal as possible for the teams reaching the semis, but I'd prefer mixing the groups up for the semis (as in previous tournaments), mainly because I don't enjoy re-matches too much and to me it seems unbalanced if one half is stronger (which seems to be the case this year).
This being said, we'll probably have no re-matches and the winner will come from group A or B. |
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2007-12-06 - Untitled Comment |
| Posted by Petrograd |
Always interesting to read your analyzes :)
I've got the same favorites in the first two groups, and in the last two it's really hard to know who will proceed. If I were to pick the two most likely I'd, too, pick Spain and Greece, but it'd be surprising if there wasn't an upset in that group.
Regarding group C, I really feel for Romania, they got the worst possible choices from every other seeding category. Either way it'll be interesting with so many good teams out already by the time the quarter finals start =P |
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2007-12-07 - simulation |
| Posted by SwedeinFrance |
I was really interested in the simulations that you've been doing roger64. And I must say kind of jealous that you were able to do such fun calculations. So I sat down and build a model for simulating the EURO and am now able to run several fun simulations based on that model. I thought it was interesting to do a comparison to your simulation. These are my results from 10000 simulations of the winner:
Italy 15.84%
France 14.00%
Germany 10.76%
Spain 10.65%
Czech Rep 9.61%
Netherlands 7.25%
Switzerland 6.83%
Croatia 6.19%
Portugal 5.14%
Romania 4.29%
Greece 2.40%
Turkey 2.26%
Poland 1.49%
Russia 1.42%
Sweden 1.36%
Austria 0.51%
(my simulations are also based on the eloratings)
As expected, the results are very similar.
I've also run simulations on when Sweden gets knocked out and so on. If you would like to have those results for your country, just let me know and I'll publish some more results. |
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2007-12-07 - Re: simulation |
| Posted by rdasilva |
| Very nice. I did something similar many years ago. It would be very interesting to compare these stats to what William Hill or other betting shops are quoting. Shame England isn't going to be at the tournament because then we'd clearly be able to see the usual bias and overrated odds for England... Perhaps this is just a ploy to encourage the locals to bet for their team as the bookies are sure that they'll make money, or perhaps there's some subjectiveness in their calculations. ;-) |
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2007-12-10 - my simulations vs. betting firms |
| Posted by SwedeinFrance |
Comparing the results to the odds given at betting firms was one of my first impulses as well and that's just what I did after running the simulations. The list below shows the following values:
country - chance of winning (1 million runs in my simulator) - chance of winning translated to odds (1/chance of winning) - average of odds given by the 5 largest betting firms in Sweden - average bookie odds/my calculated odds
Italy - 14.96% - 6.68 - 6.30 - 94%
France - 12.94% - 7.73 - 8.00 - 103%
Germany - 10.71% - 9.34 - 6.20 - 66%
Spain - 10.33% - 9.68 - 8.30 - 86%
Czech Rep - 9.53% - 10.49 - 16.60 - 158%
Croatia - 6.91% - 14.47 - 17.80 - 123%
Switzerland - 6.90% - 14.48 - 21.40 - 148%
Netherlands - 6.76% - 14.79 - 8.80 - 59%
Portugal - 5.04% - 19.84 - 10.20 - 51%
Romania - 4.53% - 22.09 - 26.80 - 121%
Greece - 2.94% - 34.04 - 27.00 - 79%
Turkey - 2.40% - 41.74 - 52.40 - 126%
Poland - 1.94% - 51.53 - 50.40 - 98%
Sweden - 1.89% - 52.96 - 24.00 - 45%
Russia - 1.60% - 62.49 - 33.00 - 53%
Austria - 0.63% - 159.03 - 73.60 - 46%
The interesting value here is of course the "average bookie odds/my calculated odds". The expected value is something between 80-90% since the betting firms usually have approximately a 15% margin to their favor. The higher this percentage is, the more favourable the odds given by the betting firms are for anyone who wants to put money on it.
So basically what we see is that Germany, Holland, Portugal, Sweden, Russia and Austria are highly overrated among the (Swedish) betting firms. On the other hand there are very favourable odds on the Czech Republic and Switzerland.
However, this is all under the hypothesis that the ELOratings actually reflect the current strength of the teams. |
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2007-12-10 - Re: my simulations vs. betting firms |
| Posted by rdasilva |
| Very nice! You kind'a expect the 'local' betting firms to go for the local team. Germany's values are understandable but why Holland, Portugal, Russia and Austria are so overrated I don't understand. Possibly both Holland and Portugal have recently underperformed but I can't say that for Russia and Austria, although I guess for Austria they are adding home-advantage. |
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2007-12-11 - home advantage |
| Posted by SwedeinFrance |
In my simulations I included a 100 point home advantage to Switzerland & Austria to the ELOratings. It was interesting to see that when I added a 50 point "home" advantage to Germany and re-ran the simulation they indeed ended up as favourites with the same win percentage as Italy.
I think the reason why Austria and Russia are overrated is that the betting firms are reluctant to pay 160 times the money for any team, even if the chances of them winning are small. |
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2007-12-13 - Untitled Comment |
| Posted by Petrograd |
I note that some rankings may be misportraiting the teams... I'm thinking mainly of the teams that happened to lose points in the end of the qualifications - Netherlands, Germany, and to a lesser extent Czech republic which may have benefited from Germany's lack of motivation.
I still find the great gaps in the teams' likeliness to win and their odds interesting :P |
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2008-01-05 - Euro |
| Posted by Anonymous |
Portugal and the Czech Republic are opponents to be taken seriously.Scolari has an impressive record and maybe the best player in Ronaldo,they will be deeper than they were in qualifying when they could have played better but still qualified.The Czech Republic beat Germany 3-0 with 1st place on the line in their qualifying division.Croatia is a team to also be taken seriously.The last team to knockout England in such a fashion was Poland in the 1974 WC qualifying and they went on to post the highest winning pct in the next 3 aggregate World Cups finishing 3rd in 74 getting knocked out by G.Mueller 5th in 78 getting knocked out by M.Kempes and 3rd in 82 getting knocked out by P.Rossi.All by golden boot wiiners and WC champs.So Croatia is a team on the rise.The Eastern European teams are being underestimated by the linemakers.
Good Site |
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2008-03-01 - Untitled Comment |
| Posted by Petrograd |
Got linked to this article about English football.
http://www.goal.com/en/Articolo.aspx?ContenutoId=584387
I'm not sure I agree it's ignorance causing their optimism, maybe it's just wishful thinking, but either way I like the article. |
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2008-03-01 - Re: unttitled comment |
| Posted by rdasilva |
| Hi Petrograd, nice to see were not the only ones who realize this 'inconvenient truth'. You sometimes get the feeling that the rest of the world thinks we're mad, but I think we know who the mad ones are! ;-) |
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