Essay talk:The Math of Becoming Second at the Fifa World Cup and the UEFA Euro.

Maybe fix the title to "Losing" rather than "Loosing" the Bronze. Loosing the Bronze suggests maybe hurling it at your opponent or something. Yes English is crazy for having a long vowel sound in this word, yet reserving the double-o which usually means long vowel for a different word which doesn't have a long vowel. Too bad. Tialaramex (talk) 21:27, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Also, maybe spell out the assumptions involved. My stats might just be too weak, but it wasn't obvious to me what the chance of, say, the best team in the world beating the second best is assumed to be. In practice State of the Art in football (soccer) statistics is fairly weak, but I'd expect that it varies greatly depending on just how much better the best actually is. 538 has done some stuff on the World Cup you should take a look at if you care and haven't already. Tialaramex (talk) 21:27, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Ah, I just spotted the footnote. Yeah, that's not at all realistic but at least it makes sense to me now. Tialaramex (talk) 21:36, 18 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much - at last, I corrected my mistake at File:Worldcup-004.svg.
 * I'm following Nate Silver's blog. They tried during the World Cup to determine the winner of various matches, I just want to see how good the framework of the World Cup /Euro is to spot the best teams...
 * The assumptions are not very realistic, they describe a best-case scenario: how good is the system under ideal circumstances? In reality, the systems will fare worse. --larron (talk) 15:31, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Did I miss something?
Where's the randomness entering in to this? Is it the roundrobin group allocation? Does that mean that a second ranked team misses the finals by being in an earlier round knockout game with the top ranked team? MarmotHead (talk) 16:42, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Exactly, it's the round-robin group allocation: e.g., for the World Cup 2014, there were $$\frac{32!}{(4!)^8} = 2,390,461,829,733,887,910,000,000 $$ = $$2.39046182973388791 \times 10^{24}$$ to do so. If the two best teams are in the same group, they'll meet again in the final. But if they are in different groups, there is a possibility to be matched in the quarter-finals. --larron (talk) 06:07, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Only 4 moles of possibilities?
 * If you altered the rules of your analysis to include chance victories of lower over higher ranked, you'd clearly get different numerical results (the top teams could get knocked out even earlier), but qualitatively it'd be the same: the top teams don't always make it to the final game. I think your answer is actually the most optimistic scenario for the final being between the best teams. MarmotHead (talk) 15:14, 23 July 2014 (UTC)