The UEFA EURO 2020 prediction winner is …

The participants

Nine participants provided submissions and they did not have to explain how they arrived at their predictions. The predictions could be based on gut feeling, reading tea leaves or complex statistical models.

Figur 1: Initial prediction of the team that will win the UEFA EURO 2020 tournament. One contestant was absolutely certain that Belgium would win.

And the winner is …

The prediction winner will be the participant who provided a prediction that will return the lowest Tournament Rank Prediction Score as proposed in Evaluating one-shot tournament predictions by Ekstrøm, Van Eetvelde, Ley and Brefeld. The socceR package on CRAN will be used for the computation and smaller numbers indicate better predictions.

I’ve assigned some names to the entries based on the GitHub uploads. I do apologize if the names are not adequately covering the underlying prediction approach.

# The object pred_list contains a list of matrix predictions
# Tournament outcome. Ranks
outcome <- c(6, 1, 5, 4,
             3, 6, 4, 6,
             5, 4, 5, 6,
             2, 5, 6, 4,
             3, 5, 6, 6,
             6, 5, 5, 5)

data.frame(team=colnames(pred_list[[1]]), rank=outcome)
              team rank
1           Turkey    6
2            Italy    1
3            Wales    5
4      Switzerland    4
5          Denmark    3
6          Finland    6
7          Belgium    4
8           Russia    6
9      Netherlands    5
10         Ukraine    4
11         Austria    5
12 North Macedonia    6
13         England    2
14         Croatia    5
15        Scotland    6
16  Czech Republic    4
17           Spain    3
18          Sweden    5
19          Poland    6
20        Slovakia    6
21         Hungary    6
22        Portugal    5
23          France    5
24         Germany    5
result <- sapply(pred_list, function(i) { socceR::trps(i, outcome)})

For comparison, a completely flat prediction where each team was assigned the same probability of each rank would yield a TRPS of 0.1399. Note that this completely uninformative prediction performs better than two of the entries: Simple and CD. Especially the Simple entry performed spectacularly bad and had a tournament rank predictions score that was markedly larger than a completely flat prediction. Confident prediction that are wrong are being penalized heavily!

Congratulations to Lennart Brandt who provided a prediction based on the teams’ ELO rating and had the best overall tournament prediction.