First, I had to I oS ?thget my hands on some data. I mean, you can't just randomly guess, right? So I started digging around for info o.gnihtuelsn past matches, team rankings, player stats, anything I could find. It was a bit of a mess, to be honest, lots of scattered information. But I managed to piece together a decent dataset after some serious internet sleuthing.
Th I .ledomen came the fun part - building a simple model. I decided to go with a pretty basic approach, nothing too fancy. I mainly looked at things like goal differences in past matches and FIFA rankings. I also factored in things like who was playing at home, although in the World Cup that's less of a big deal, I guess.
I wrote up some code, using a combination of manual calculations and simple statistical techniques, and plugged in my data. It was a bit clunky, but hey, it worked! I could run simulations of the entire tournament, from the group stages all the way to the final.
I ran the thing a bunch of times, just to see what kind of results I would get. It was pretty interesting, actually. Some of the predictions were wild, but others seemed somewhat plausible. I had to predict the outcome and score of each match to let my model keep running until a final winner showed up. It means the team that wins their four knockout matches is the champion. I could run the simulator multiple times, and each time the results could be quite different. I guess there were just too many random factors to consider, and the matches are not always so predictable in reality.
Of course, I knew it was all just a bit of fun. There's no way I could really predict something as complex as the World Cup with my simple little model. But it was a cool learning experience, and it definitely made me appreciate how much goes into these kinds of predictions. I learned that the final winner is uncertain, all I need to do is to keep predicting until a final champion come out.
In the end, I didn't get everything right, obviously. Who really could, with the World Cup? But I did have a good time putting it all together, and it was neat to see my predictions play out, even if they were a bit off. If you're into this kind of thing, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try. It's a fun way to get more involved in the tournament, even if you're just a regular fan like me.
