Blue Yonder predicts more World Cup misery for England

Blue Yonder has turned its AI technology to predicting the results of the 2018 World Cup, which kicks off today.

The venture has analysed the results of 38,000 international football matches and run 1,000,000 simulations of the tournament to evaluate each team's chance of progression through the rounds to eventual glory. Sadly for England fans, Blue Yonder's AI predicts just a 5.7% chance of victory, although it does give the Three Lions the edge over their Group G rivals Belgium, with 41.7% chance of beating Kevin De Bruyne, Eden Hazard and co. Brazil emerged as tournament favourites, with a 22.5% chance of winning, followed by Spain on 11.1%, Argentina (9.5%), Germany (9.3%), and France (7.8%).

“We spend most of our time using AI to make hundreds of millions of daily calculations to predict customer demand and optimise pricing for multi-national retailers, so naturally we wanted to try to predict the unpredictable and forecast the World Cup, using our AI capabilities,” says Christian Haag, Data Science Consultant at Blue Yonder. “We took data from every available international match going to back to 1872 and then ran simulations accounting for different outcomes for each match for all 32 teams, with either Team 1 designated as the winner, Team 2 winning, or a draw.”