A prediction model claims Brazil will be the champion of World Cup 2022

The 2022 FIFA World Cup, also known as Qatar 2022, started yesterday, and its excitement has echoed worldwide. It is a matter of curiosity which nation will be the champion in this big event.

Well, good news for both science and soccer lovers because Brazil has a 25 percent probability of winning the men's football World Cup, according to Alan Turning Institute's prediction model that anybody can use, but the results are bleak for many other countries.

As reported in New Scientist, a prediction program from the London-based Alan Turing Institute predicts revealed that Brazil is given a 1-in-4 chance by the publicly available model, whereas England is given a chance of less than 1-in-10.

A model that people can run on their PCs at home, with 1000 tournament run-throughs taking 15 minutes on a typical laptop, was created by Nick Barlow of the Alan Turing Institute and his colleagues.

"It's quite important to us for most of the things we do that we make them open source," says Barlow to New Scientist. "We encourage people to get involved, to use our code, and to contribute to it."

Brazil's next-closest rival is Belgium, with 19 percent, as per the prediction program. On the other hand, the second closest is Argentina with 13 percent.

A common method was used

The researchers modified their model to account for differences in the strength of teams that compete against each other in international friendlies, as well as eliminate the home advantage that will be absent for all teams in Qatar aside from the home nation. This method is frequently used for matches in domestic leagues and assigns teams a score for defense and attack.

Along with training the model on previous competitions to check how well its predictions matched up to the actual results and making adjustments depending on its performance, they modified it to give more weight to the outcomes of specific matches, such as semifinals, finals, and more recent games.

We will see on December 18 whether the prediction program works or not. For now, the only thing we need to do is to watch and enjoy the games.

More about Qatar 2022

The 2022 FIFA World Cup is the 22nd FIFA World Cup and will be an international association football competition between the men's national teams of FIFA's member associations. The 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan was the second one staged exclusively in Asia. This World Cup is the first in the Arab world. Due to the field expanding to 48 teams for the event in 2026, this tournament is the last to include 32 participant teams. The tournament's matches will take place in eight locations.