Euro 2008 predictions
I decided that this time my European Championships predictions will rely solely on the country rankings according to FIFA. The method is following (where A corresponds to the ranking position of the lowest ranked country of the pair and B - to the highest ranked).:
if(A-B<=5) result="0-0";
else if(A-B<=10) result="1-0";
else if(A-B<=20) result="2-0";
else if(A-B<=30) result="3-0";
else if(A-B<=40) result="4-0";
else result="5-0";
* Please notice that bigger ranking number = lower ranking (as the highest ranked country has the ranking of 1)
As you can see this system returns only goal differences and not the actual results (because how on earth can I deduct from the rankings how strong a team is in defence or attack). Here are the probable results:
Switzerland - Czech Rep. 0-4
Portugal - Turkey 1:0
Czech Rep. - Portugal 0-0
Switzerland - Turkey 0-3
Switzerland - Portugal 0-4
Turkey - Czech Rep. 0-2
Austria - Croatia 0-5
Germany - Poland 3:0
Croatia - Germany 0-1
Austria - Poland 0-5
Poland - Croatia 0-2
Austria - Germany 0-5
Romania - France 0-0
Netherlands - Italy 0-1
Italy - Romania 1-0
Netherlands - France 0-0
Netherlands - Romania 0-0
France - Italy 0-0
Spain - Russia 2-0
Greece - Sweden 3-0
Sweden - Spain 0-3
Greece - Russia 2-0
Greece - Spain 0-0
Russia - Sweden 1-0
Why am I making such predictions? In order to see in how many matches in the actual championships the outcome will be according to ratings and to be even more specific - what will the correlation between the actual match outcomes and the rankings. That is I want to check whether rankings do mean anything at European Championships or not (in ice hockey you very rarely see a country that`s not in the top 8 beat any country from this top - this year there was the sensational loss of Slovakia against Germany and the draw between Finland and Norway). So theoretically Austria should be beaten to the pulp like a dead duck (holding the 92nd spot in FIFA rankings), but can you *really* be sure that it will indeed happen?