Joachim Klement, the German economist who made correct predictions at three World Cups, has also made a forecast for this edition of the tournament.
At the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Paul the Octopus correctly predicted the results of all of Germany’s matches. At the time he was praised worldwide as a forecaster.
Klement has since gone beyond even Paul with a complex forecasting model that, since 2014, has correctly predicted the World Cup winner every time.
According to this model, if the Netherlands win the trophy at this World Cup, it will be the fourth success for Klement’s statistics-based forecast.
His model describes not only the winning team but the trajectory of the entire World Cup for all 48 teams.
In it, Japan are forecast to record a stunning win over Brazil in the second round, and at the same stage Scotland are forecast to bid farewell at the hands of South Korea.
He has also predicted that England will reach the semi-finals and that, two decades after 2006, Portugal will once again knock England out of the tournament.
Klement, who describes himself as a pessimist and has lived in the United Kingdom for a decade, says the purpose of his work was never to avoid disappointment or to earn money by gambling.
Rather, he wanted to show how irrational it can be to try to predict results.
After his first prediction came true, when his own country Germany won the 2014 World Cup, Klement thought that if the exercise were repeated in 2018 it would be proved to have been pure coincidence.
But he was proved right again, in the case of France in 2018 and Argentina in 2022.
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