The plan

During the 2018 World Cup I was messing about with a simple prediction model based on the Elo ratings and came up with graphics that people quite liked, so I ran then again for the Women’s World Cup the following year and will be giving them another run-out for the Euros.

What I’ll be aiming to do throughout the tournament is create updated graphics after every round of matches, showing the revised prospects for the teams who just played and also how the latest results have impacted the likely shape of the knockout stages.

The model

As I’m not a statistician by trade, my model is a fairly simple one which uses each team’s Elo rating to simulate the tournament, match-by-match, 100,000 times to generate a percentage chance for each outcome. I’ve hopefully coded in all the draws for the various rounds correctly, for example the four best third-placed teams qualifying.

The graphics

Without further ado, here are the probabilities for each of the 24 teams alphabetical order. Starting in the bottom half, we have their chances of finishing in each position within their group on the left and their spread of possible points on the right. The top half has their chances of reaching each stage of the tournament on the left and the spread of their most likely opponents at each stage in descending order on the right (with flags and percentages squeezed in where there’s enough space).

I’ve also got summary graphics for the knockout stages.