Don't Try Picking A World Cup Winner. Just Sit Back And Enjoy The Show
The World Cup is extremely unpredictable for three basic reasons:
1. As any honest investment adviser will tell you, past performance is a poor guide to future performance. Every World Cup, stars go in with big reputations and come out a fortnight later looking like tired old men (the possible fate of Luis Suarez, who will be 31 when the tournament starts) while unknown youngsters steal the show (recall Thomas Muller in 2010).
2. Luck matters more in soccer than in other ballgames. In baseball, each team has 27 outs, so an individual at-bat is rarely decisive; tennis Grand Slams are played over five sets, so Roger Federer can afford to lose two and still win. But in the knockout stages of a World Cup, a game is typically decided by one goal -- or by a penalty shootout.
3. The World Cup's format favors unpredictability. If this competition were a league, played over 38 games, the best team would most probably win. Over the long run, luck tends to even out. One week the referee will wrongly give your opponents a penalty; the next week, he'll give it to you.
Then there's the occasionally outsized role of home advantage at this tournament. In international soccer generally, playing at home was worth an average of a goal a game between 2000 and 2014 according to Stefan Szymanski, economics professor at the University of Michigan (and my coauthor on the book "Soccernomics"). But in some World Cups, playing at home may matter even more. I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist but there are powerful interests (chiefly big sponsors and FIFA) who want the host nation to stay in the tournament as long as possible so as to keep the home fans interested.
Read the full article on ESPN by Simon Kuper here: http://www.espn.com/soccer/fifa-world-cup/4/blog/post/3291238/simon-kuper-world-cup-is-so-unpredictable-which-makes-it-so-good