The Global Game of Football

Source: Statista

Often referred to as the global game, football (i.e. soccer) is played, followed and talked about in almost every corner of planet earth. The sport’s biggest event, the quadrennial FIFA World Cup, is one of the biggest sporting events in the world, only matched by the Olympics in terms of its near universal reach. According to FIFA, 3.2 billion people watch at least one minute of World Cup coverage on TV in 2014, a number that will likely be matched by this year’s tournament in Russia.

The following chart, based on a Nielsen survey conducted in more than 20 international markets, shows where people are particularly fond of the global game and where interest in football is limited at best.

Goldman Sachs Report – This Is Who Will Win The World Cup

Goldman Sachs Research have published the sixth edition of their book “World Cup and Economics” which includes “economic insight, tenuous correlations and footballing views” for public use “as a guide and companion through the upcoming competition.”

They make some bold claims after crunching 200,000 probability trees and 1 million simulations, specifically:

“England meets Germany in the quarters, where Germany wins; and Germany meets Brazil in the final, and Brazil prevails.”

The full report can be found here, in the interim there is this brief video: