Sure Barack Obama won the Presidential election last year. But he wasn’t the only big winner. Nate Silver, the number-cruncher behind FiveThirtyEight.com was another victor, having predicted the result with uncanny accuracy. Silver is a sabermetrician, which is to say that he began his public life as an analyst for the brilliant Baseball Prospectus years before he brought his statistical nous to politics.
Using regression analyses, among other tools, to predict political outcomes is one thing; trying to create a predictive rankings system for international football is quite another. By “quite another” I mean vastly more difficult. Nonetheless, Silver has attempted this. So, as a rival to FIFA’s rankings (which are, as he admits, less useless than was once the case) Silver has come up with his own football league table. Unlike other such enterprises, however, they are also designed to be predictive as well as reflective.
According to Silver, England are the third best team in the world.
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