Finally, the group stage has finished, one of the 495 possible permutations of 3rd place finishers that could happen, has happened, and we arrive at a 32-team straight knockout.  Let’s preview the last 32! My odds vs. Market odds Figure 1 Game by game Brazil vs. Japan I rate Brazil as 0.78 goal favourites here…

For a short time today every World Cup team has played 2 games. These are my team ratings, currently using a 2:1:1 weight for the average of the 3 different metrics!

Introduction Over the years I have focused on team performance metrics using passes/shots/goals to make predictive team ratings.  International football is a different beast to domestic football because nations play far fewer games than domestic teams.  On top of this schedule adjustments are much harder than domestic leagues as between world cups nations nearly only…