EURO 2024 Semifinals Predictions

Predictions for the EUROPEAN FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIP 2024 based on Statistical Analytical Football Models

AUEB & Trieste Sports Analytics Research Group,

Athens University of Economics and Business and University of Trieste

This article was edited and co-authored by Ioannis Ntzoufras, Professor of Statistics at AUEB, and Argyro Damoulaki, PhD Candidate in the same department. The article is based on the analysis of the collaborating team of Trieste (Professor Leonardo Egidi and PhD candidates Roberto Macri Demartino and Giulio Fantuzzi) with the assistance of V. Palaskas (OpenBet, application development) D. Karlis (AUEB Statistics, analysis consultant). The final result is cooperation between the research teams of the two universities on Sports Analytics.

***

We reached the semi-finals of the European Championship 2024 with two great games between traditional teams. Spain will face France while the Netherlands will face England. Based on the matches so far, Spain seems to be in better form, while England and France are scoring with difficulty. As for the Netherlands, they went through the group without impressing and had a more "passable" path in the two knockout rounds. As in the previous articles, we will briefly review our predictions for the quarter-finals and present our predictions for the semi-finals.

Reminder for friends of Statistics  

The use of statistical techniques to predict football matches first appeared in the scientific literature in 1968 with the pioneering scientific publication of Reep & Benjamin. The next real innovations appear in the 80s (with the work of Michael Maher) and the 90s (with the work of Lee in 1997). However, the first important publications in the field, introducing models on which models are based and which we still use today, were the works of Dixon & Coles in 1997 and the bivariate Poisson model of Karlis and Ntzoufra in 2003 (two of the authors of this analysis). These two models formed the basis of modern models for predicting football match outcomes.

In this analysis we use the model of Karlis and Ntzoufras through the package "footbayes" in the statistical programming language R developed by Professor Leonardo Egidi from the University of Trieste with the assistance of Vasilis Palaskas (Analyst at Open Bet and active member of AUEB Sports Analytics Group). The model also includes the estimation of parameters that estimate the performance of each group that change over time. To learn the model, all international matches of the 2020-2024 period were used. The main explanatory variable is the difference between the two teams in the Coca-Cola/FIFA ranking.  The model, first proposed by Karlis & Ntzoufras in 2003, extends the usual two-variate Poisson model.  Details of the statistical and machine learning model used can be found at the end of this article.

Review of the quarter-finals.

Both France and England needed the penalty shootout to eventually prevail against Portugal and Switzerland, respectively. The model had "predicted" a win of the two teams without quite high probability, but it had also attributed a remarkable probability to the draw, 28%, as well as the end season of the two matches. The Netherlands prevailed against Turkey with a reversal (while the winning goal was an own goal) in regular time, as the model had predicted (Dutch win with a probability of 61%). As for the exciting match between Spain and Germany, the former prevailed in extra time with a goal in the last minute. It should be noted that the draw was a fairly likely result based on the model, 28%, while Spain's win had a 45% chance. 

Overall, the model correctly predicted one match (1/4) while the tied results in the remaining three matches were remarkable (28%).  

Table 1: Table with the odds of the outcome of the matches for the quarter-finals of the European Championship 2024.

Predictions for the Semi-finals

At this phase, all games outcomes are possible, which is reflected in the predictions of our model. In particular, the first semi-final between Spain and France seems to be extremely close, since the probability of Spain winning is 33%, France winning is 36% and the draw 31%. As for the second game, England's chance of winning reaches 50% (49.5% to be precise) and thus has a slight lead based on the model, without considered as favorite since both outcomes, the Netherlands win and the draw, have an increased probability (24% and 26% respectively).

Table 2: Table with the odds of the outcome of the matches for the semi-finals of the European Championship 2024.

Figure 1 gives in more detail the odds for each score for each of the 2 semi-finals.

Figure  1: Probability Chart of possible scores for the semi-finals of the European Championship 2024.