The Wall Street Journal has featured Palisade's World Cup 2014 simulation model in their article, "The Journal's Prediction".

Reporter Matthew Futterman consulted Palisade's Fernando Hernández on his "brilliantly logical prediction model" that picks who would win–with home-field advantage, and without.

As Futterman put it,

"Some 50,000 iterations later, the team with the highest probability to win the World Cup was Germany at 19.9%. Spain, the defending champion, was second at 16.1%, followed by Argentina and Switzerland at 6.1% and Brazil at 6%.

But when Hernandez factored in Brazil's home-field advantage—which can be worth more than a half-goal a game in the World Cup by some calculations—Brazil's probability rose to 17.3% while Spain's dropped to 12.2% and Germany collapsed to 6.9%, behind Switzerland and Greece.

In other words, Germany is probably the better team, but Brazil is still the favorite. It all comes down to how much playing in front of a Brazilian crowd will motivate the hosts. We probably didn't need an algorithm to know that."

Palisade is proud to help soccer fans around the world score major points in their World Cup betting pools with our DecisionTools Suite software. Thanks to our Senior consultant Fernando Hernández for building this fascinating model!

Read more about our World Cup 2014 model here.

See also: How to win the World Cup Office Pool: Use DecisionTools Suite to Choose the Champions