Eight days to go.
Club football is starting to feel like a distant memory, and the 23rd men’s World Cup is coming into view.
We hope you enjoyed our first World Cup SVQ on Monday, and as promised, here’s your next edition just two days later. Our typing fingers are going to be very sore by late July.
Today we’ll look at England’s possible route to the World Cup final (we know, we know) as well as one of the players who could give Portugal an excellent foundation to enjoy success themselves.
We also have an Ask Opta question about England’s squad – we promise SVQ won’t just be about the Three Lions this summer – as well as another ‘Missing Players’ quiz.
🦁 STAT - England’s Route to Glory?
If it is to ‘come home’, just how will it get there?
That is the question we asked ourselves at Opta Analyst HQ this week, and we crunched the numbers and probabilities to try and work out the likeliest route England will need to take to finally win the World Cup for the first time since 1966.
As we revealed on Monday, the Opta supercomputer gave England an 11.2% chance of lifting the trophy, but just how can they do it?
They start things off in Group L against Croatia, Ghana and Panama, with a whopping 96% chance of reaching the last 32 (as of Monday’s projections).
There are numerous different outcomes from there, but the likeliest is that DR Congo would await in the first knockout stage.