May the best team win the Cup, but ...

The starting point to determine the winner of the Football World Cup has to be to look at some combination of rankings, past form, players and market odds. We (at Deutsche Bank) employ a quantitative approach using these inputs to spit out a first cut of likely winners.

Our models point to Brazil having the greatest chance of winning followed by Germany, Spain and France. But to leave it at that would be boring and too conventional. So we introduce what some would call ours bias, but we like to think of it as a discretionary overlay.

To begin with, we note that since the inception of the World Cup in 1930, there has been a pattern to runs of different teams winning the World Cup. On three occasions, we have had four consecutive World Cups when different teams have won, and on another three occasions we have had two consecutive World Cups where different teams have won.