Thumbing the World Cup

A moderately successful World Cup on Betfair got me thinking about pundits and probabilities. Or, if you prefer, technocrats and managerialists. As any decent gambler will tell you, heuristics beat opinions. Thankfully, there aren’t many of those about, or I’d never have bagged Switzerland at 4.5 to win a two-horse race between two teams with inseparable form.

But pundits, especially the telegenic breed you get on the Beeb and (*shudder*) ITV, rarely use heuristic arguments. Their trade is aphorism, cliche, blind prediction, ludicrous optimism and often erroneous morcels of common knowledge. Here are some I bottled during the last four weeks:

Pundit: England are a tournament team. They improve as the competition progresses.

Evidence for building the Heuristic: England haven’t eliminated a proper side from the knockout stages of any World Cup since 1966. They will lose to the first decent team they meet after the group stage.

P: Germany can’t win. This is the poorest German side since, erm, the last time they reached the World Cup final.

H: Hosts always do better than their form. Germans always do better than their form.

P: Having sailed through the group playing the best attacking football in the tournament, Germany can now go on and win it.

H: Germany haven’t beaten a major footballing nation, in competition or friendly matches, anywhere, in 90 or 120 minutes, since 2001.

P: Italy can’t win. Not a vintage side, match-fixing, Totti unfit, Del Piero past his best, no pace.

H: Italy haven’t lost any World Cup match on European soil since 1974. They haven’t been eliminated from any World Cup anywhere in 90 mins. since 1986.

P: Brazil will stroll it: Magic Quartet blah blah, blah.

H: Teams rarely retain the trophy, and certainly not with the same team that won the previous time. Italy tried it in 1986, Argentina in 1990, France in 2002. All failed. Plus the obvious: South American teams, bar 1958, never win in Europe.

P: This is England’s Golden Generation. They will beat Portugal comfortably.

H: In four tournaments, England have reached three quarter-finals. In four tournaments Portugal have reached a final and two semis. This wasn’t reflected in the respective prices, and hence value.

P: Argentina have the youth, skill, organization and talent to win the tournament.

H: Leaving aside playing at home (everyone bar the English knows that doesn’t count), Argentina have never been past the quarter-finals without Maradona.

Of course, some of this was constructed with the benefit of hindsight (as heuristics must be). Some won’t apply next time a World Cup comes around (it will be in Africa, for example, though intriguingly in a European time-zone). And maybe I’ve only thought this through in this way because I had cash at stake. In which case, despite all the well-grounded objections, perhaps demand-revealing referendums really are the closest to ideal government we can hope to get.