Solely for academic purposes. There are no blessings in betting.
For convenience this study uses fifa world ranking scores1 of mid-december of the year in which the world cup2 was held.3
| Year | Fifa ranking no. 1 | Fifa ranking no. 2 | Fifa ranking no. 3 | Fifa ranking no. 4 | Winner world cup |
| 1994 | Brazil | Spain | Sweden | Italy | Brazil (final won from Italy) |
| 1998 | Brazil | France | Germany | Croatia | France (finalist Brazil) |
| 2002 | Brazil | France | Spain | Germany | Brazil (finalist Germany) |
| 2006 | Brazil | Italy | Argentina | France | Italy (finalist France) |
| 2010 | Spain | Netherlands | Germany | Brazil | Spain (finalist Netherlands) |
| 2014 | Germany | Argentina | Colombia | Belgium | Germany (finalist Argentina) |
| 2018 | Belgium | France | Brazil | Croatia | France (finalist Croatia) |
| 2022 | Brazil | Argentina | France | Belgium | Argentina (finalist France) |
| 2026 (pred.)4 | Argentina | Spain | France | England | see text |
As can be noted from the table the winner is always from the first two positions. Furthermore it is split exactly 50/50 between the first spot and the second spot. This would indicate that both Spain and Argentina have a chance of 0.5 to win the world cup.
Can we improve on this? Believe it or not but the historical results since 1952 are absolutely equal: Argentina has won six times, drawn two times and lost six times. So the only indication that we have is the “resultaat” or “=goals scored – goals conceded” which yields “-1” on a total of 37 goals. So this favours Spain over Argentina with 1/37 = 0.027 (p).
- https://inside.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/men?dateId=id56 ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIFA_World_Cup_finals ↩︎
- This is possible if one assumes a point of view of cyclial time rather than linear time. ↩︎
- Fifa world cup rankings data as of 11th of june ↩︎