Denmark Win the European Championships

First-off, an apology regarding my last post:

Anonymous
You forgot Sweden as a participant!

Well, I didn't "forget" them, I just highlighted the wrong team - Turkey in the first table instead of Sweden - and so took Turkey across to the second table. Sorry about that. Anyway, you still get the picture and I can't be bothered to redo the tables.

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Aah, so it's not Portugal who win the European Championships, as I boldly stated in my last entry. Nope, amazingly Denmark will pull-off another almighty shock just as they did back in '92.

So what do I base this new brash assumption upon? It's based on additional Elo points gained during the last year. Here's the table to prove it:

Yes, Denmark have gained more Elo ranking points this year than any other team. Not sure how relevant these particular stats are, mind you: look at Holland, undoubtedly one of the more likely teams to figure prominently in the competition yet down in last place in my table, with -56 points.

If you want to view how the Elo World Rankings would work for the first eight matches of the European Championships, you can see the details in the downloadable spreadsheet HERE.

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Don't like those stats. Okay, how about these. Let's look and see if there is any correlation between FIFA World rankings and past success in the European Championships. Let's see who's outstripped their world ranking the most and who has fared the worst.

Just like the previous posts, I will only be looking at Euro ’96 onwards due to the format change in the competition at that point. The FIFA World rankings are easily available for all the ’96, ’00, ’04 and ’08 Championships.

For each previous European Championship, I have taken the world rankings from May of each relevant year, so one month before each competition started. The non-European teams have obviously been excluded from these rankings, so I’ve therefore “scrunched” their positions up to fill any vacant slots. The rankings of course have absolute numbers, but when comparing those rankings against final position within each competition, I’ve had to make some decisions:

Winner of competition     = First (no shit)
Runner-up                 = Second 
Losing Semi-finalist      = 3.5 (average of 3rd and 4th)
Losing Quarter-finalist   = 6.5 (average of 5th to 8th)
Losing in Group Stage     = 12.5 (average of 9th to 16th)

Therefore if a team is ranked 4th in the world according to FIFA, then they would be expected to reach the 3.5 level (semi-finals) in the Euros. If they do better than that, they will attract a positive score; if, however, they only make it to the quarter-finals, then they will receive a negative score (3.5 minus 6.5).

This of course is completely unfair as, if a country is always near the top of the world rankings, then they can only meet their expectations but rarely better them, whilst weaker, lower-ranked teams can more easily exceed the ranking. This is graphically demonstrated with this table:

Hmm, Portugal out in front again. Let's ignore that for now, and try and tailor our ranking a bit better. How about if I give each team a starting value of 1 to 16 points dependent on their current world ranking? So Spain will get a 16 point head-start.

Oh damn. It's Portugal again, the one-man team that is not fancied at all this time around - especially as they are in the "group of death".

Oh well. As I said yesterday, you only have one choice. Lump on! :-)