EXCLUSIVE: (A) Winner of the World Cup Revealed

New to Stats Insider this week is our 2018 World Cup Simulator. As far as we know, it's the only place online you can simulate the entirety of the 2018 World Cup to your little heart's content. If you're Australian, you can develop RSI trying to find a simulation in which Australia win the World Cup (it's about 3 in 10,000) or, if you're an Englishman, you can find out how tantalisingly close England come - again - before their inevitable defeat by Germany on penalties.

What does it do?

Basically, each time you press simulate, we process 10,000 simulations of each of the 64 matches of the World Cup. We run the group stages, and show you the final finishing positions across each of the 8 groups, and the teams that make it through to the knockout stages. Then, we transition to a bracket view and show you the path of your team through the tournament. On mobile, you can see how your country performed, when they got knocked out, and who by, while if you switch to the desktop view you can see every match of the knockout stages, who won, and what Cinderella story made it to the latter stages (hint: it's not Russia).

What goes into a match sim?

As with all of our simulations on Stats Insider, the basis for our simulations are our proprietary machine learning algorithms. We take a range of inputs, including team-level (top-down) and player-level (bottom-up) information, historic stadium and weather information, as well as information gleaned from the betting markets and synthesise them into performance projections for each player and each team. From there, we run 10,000 simulations of each match to form our overall projections for each game. Each run of the World Cup Simulator draws from one of those 10,000 simulations for its match result. So yes, in some of the simulations Australia will beat France, just not in many of them. This is the same process we use for our match predictions, which will be up on the site for the entire World Cup very soon. 

How often is it updated?

Before the tournament, the backend of the simulator will automatically update with new information, including on June 4 once squads are announced for the World Cup, so make sure you keep checking back regularly. Who knows - maybe Australia will muster a 1% chance of winning at some point!

Australia gets knocked out by Russia, of all teams, in this simulation - just 1 of 10,000 possible ways the 2018 World Cup could play out.

During the tournament itself, the simulation will regularly be updated with the results of the tournament so far, so you can run updated simulations throughout the whole World Cup.

Where can I get more information on a specific match?

Next week we'll launch our 2018 World Cup portal, with full information on every match for the World Cup. You'll be able to see the results of our simulations, including the predicted goals for every team, in every match, their chance of winning, our projections for the total goals, both teams to score, correct score and first goalscorer market, as well as our renowned Expert Previews for each match. We'll also have extensive written coverage of the tournament on Stats Insider throughout the tournament, picking the holes in the markets and identifying the value opportunities you're looking for, so stay tuned!

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