Predicting World Cup winner?
I’m wanting to do a side project to predict the winner of the World Cup, but I’m unsure of the best route to take. This is not meant to inform any betting. It’s just something I want to do for fun :)
In short, if you were to predict the winner of the World Cup, how would you go about it?
I’ve done modeling in the past of soccer, but everything I’ve done doesn’t seem applicable to the World Cup. Using historical data of previous games seems inaccurate, given four years have passed and teams change wildly. Elo ratings also seem impossible to calibrate for a similar reason. Using individual stats from the players that were invited to each national team sounds like an insane workload.
I basically don’t have any ideas that are solid to model this kind of event. Again, given this is meant to be a side project, I just want to come up with an informed guess, but I’m having a hard time thinking of something substantially better than a coin flip.
Any thoughts are appreciated!