Argentina appears with a 35% chance of winning the World Cup title and Morocco remains a big surprise, with only 9%, according to predictions made at bookmakers.
Current world champion, France continues as the main favorite, with a 45% probability, while Croatia, who beat Brazil in the medals in the quarterfinals, has 11% of lifting the cup. The semifinals, which define the finalists for the decision on December 18, begin this Tuesday.
Dates and times of the Qatar Cup semifinals:
Tuesday (13) at 4 pm: Argentina vs Croatia
Wednesday (14th) at 4pm: France v Morocco
The percentages were estimated by InfoMoney based on the “odds” of three bookmakers (bet365, sportingbet and beftair). Implied probability shows as odds in percentages, excludes the profit margin of online bookmakers.
The odd is a multiplier of the amount that a player earns if his guess is correct and, the closer it is to 1, the more certain a result is (and the further away, the more confident). Therefore, they indicate the probability of a certain outcome occurring.
Morocco: the big underdog
Before the start of the World Cup, Morocco was one of the teams with the lowest chance of reaching the tournament’s decision: just 0.29%, alongside countries like Cameroon, Japan, Canada, Ghana and South Korea, according to the guesses.
But the Moroccans overcame another European team in the quarterfinals, beating Portugal and becoming the first African country to reach the semifinals of the competition. In the round of 16, the team had already subverted the odds and also dispatched favorites Spain.
Despite being the big underdog of the Cup so far, Morocco was leader of its group, ahead of also semifinalist Croatia, and knocked out Belgium still in the group stage. Now, the Moroccans face the French in the semifinal.
‘Profit’ of 30,000%?
The possibility of Morocco being world champion was so unlikely that bookmakers paid odds of up to 301 for the result. This means that whoever put R$ 100 in the Moroccan underdog before the ball rolls in the Cup, can earn up to 30,000% of “profit” if that happens.
Torment of the Brazilian team, Croatia had only a 1.70% chance of being champion (and paid odds of up to 51). Brazil, for example, was the biggest favorite to win the world title, with a probability of 19.3%, and paid odds of just 4.50.
Next came Argentina (13.3%) and France (10.8%), according to the “odds” of the 3 sites. During the World Cup, the French became more favorites than the Argentines. After all, the odds were changing as the phases progressed, because they take into account the bets that are being placed.
According to the odds, the quant team calculated the probability of each team being champion. Therefore, it considered the highest available odds for a given outcome and converted these odds into probabilities (excluding the bookmaker’s profit margin).
4.3% chance of reaching the semifinals
XP analysts also carried out their own survey which estimated that Morocco had 4.3% to advance to the semi-final (which it has already achieved) and only 1.3% to reach the final. France had 28.7% and 17.4% respectively; Argentina, 28.7% and 18.4%; Croatia, 16.9% and 7.0%.
XP says that the probabilities were made with a methodology of “machine learning” and data scraping, using data from team characteristics, positions in rankings and performance in recent games to build “a multinomial logistic regression model, which estimates the probability of each result for each match”.