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The World cup fever is in full swing. Players and fans from around the globe are preparing for this epic battle for football supremacy. 32 teams will play 64 games over the next few days to determine the ultimate king of football.
The group format followed by the knockout stages make for an exciting tournament. However, many critics argue if this is the ideal way to determine the best team in the world. Some feel that the league format where each team plays the other team twice (38 games in all) over a much longer time is a better way of identifying consistent top performers.
While it is logistically impossible to have such a long drawn format for the world cup, it will still be interesting to find out what would happen if the world cup was a league.
At Jigsaw academy, we love to play with data to explore such scenarios. And so we decided to explore this in more detail – What would happen if a league was drawn based on the all-time performance of various countries?
Selecting the team
The first consideration was the number of teams. There are 32 teams in every world cup and 79 different nations have participated in the 19 editions of the cup so far. We decided to choose the 20 nations that have played the most number of games across all world cups. This is how we formed this 20-team fantasy league.
Creating the performance table
We then proceeded to create a results table based on the performance of these teams in the world cups so far. We normalized the performance for 38 games i.e. we created a scenario which shows what would have happened if each team had played 38 games in the world cup.
Looking at the results
The Winners – Brazil are the Manchester City of the World Cup league
The results make for an interesting read. As expected 5 times world cup winners Brazil would top this fantasy league. What is interesting here is that Brazil has got 86 points, the exact same as this year’s EPL winner Manchester City. In fact, Brazil’s performance in the world cups can be likened to Manchester City’s performance in this year’s EPL in other ways as well. Both Brazil and Manchester City have won 27 games and lost 6 out of the 38 played. The big difference is the number of goals scored. Manchester City were exceptionally prolific in their goal scoring in the last season. They netted 102 goals as opposed to Brazil’s 83.
All in all, we can say that Brazil’s dominating performance across all world cups can be likened to Manchester city’s supremacy of the EPL in the last season.
Poland beats England in the world league
Surprisingly, Poland comes in at number 9 whereas England is placed at the 10th position. Consider the fact that Poland have been able to qualify for only 7 of the 20 world cups while England has featured in 12, even winning one. This does make for an interesting insight that overall, Poland has still performed better across all the world cups.
Competitiveness of the league
We also assessed how competitive this fantasy league would be compared to the English premier league. We used the difference in points between consecutively ranked teams as a proxy for competitiveness. On average, each team in the EPL has got 2.9 more points than the team ranking immediately below it. In the world up league, the difference is 2.6.
If we look at the comparison charts, we can see that Brazil and Germany have dominated the world cup. But if we look at the other 18 teams, the performances are very competitive with very little room for differentiation.
This data shows that the World Cup league is more competitive than the EPL. All the world cup teams are filled with starts and superstars and only minor differences separate them from each other.
We hope you found the comparison interesting. Are there any other observations of interest? We look forward to your comments.
Written by the students of Jigsaw Academy, the online school of analytics:
Aditya Chawali – Jigsaw and IMT Ghaziabad student
Tanurag Chowdhary – Jigsaw and IMT Ghaziabad student
