The ‘World Cup host’ effect on the winner

Everywhere in the world, sports is an integral part of our human community. From the medieval horse races to the futuristic Quidditch matches, most of us are enthralled in one game or more. But, the biggest of them all, the FIFA World Cup. The holy grail of football obsessed nations.

Right from the qualification stages of the World Cup, the carnival gains momentum. And like a tumble weed, it grows bigger and bigger… T-Shirts, Airline tickets, Hotel reservations, Ubers, Restaurants, Bars and all other businesses ready to feed the the insatiable appetites of the fans experience huge jumps in sales. The host countries make billions, and the sports betting companies: Trillions!!

The generation of odds and placing of bets is a game of cat and mouse between the companies and gamblers. Every detail counts in pursuit of a smile or frown for the gamblers. In this post I look at the effect of the hosting continent to the success of the continent’s teams.

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I used World Cup data from Kaggle.com for the matches and Power BI to create the visualizations and generate the insights. The visual below shows a quick scan on the world cup and how the home continent stacks up to the other continents in the matches played. I only used data for games that had a clear winner by the end of the game and does not take into consideration wins that were gotten by penalty shoot out.

Matches played by countries in the home continent against other continents which lead to a win or loss

Using the comparison data for the home continent (Continent in which the World Cup is being held) to the other continents, I generated data on wins Vs. losses for the two groups. The visual below shows my findings on losses

Loss metrics for the home continent countries

I found that of the 339 matches played by the home continent against other continents, the home continent lost 88 of the games and won 175 of the games. 76 of the matches ended up in a draw. I focussed on the metrics for games that ended up in either a win or a loss.

Win metrics for home continent countries.

From the data, it shows that for games that end up in either a loss or a win in normal play, 66.54% of the matches were won by a country in the home continent while 33.46% ended in a loss. The dotted red lines show the mean values for the percentages. It is seen that in a relatively large number of World Cups, the trend described above stayed true for more instances than not (By a factor of 2)

There seems to be TWICE the likelihood of winning a match if the world cup is being played in your continent giving you the ‘Home advantage’. The reasons for this might be varied. Over the course of the next weeks, I will be diving in deeper into this trend and try to discover a pattern and explain the findings.

As my first dive into visualization and data analysis, I would appreciate any comments or insights you may have. Please feel free to drop a comment or suggestion into which area I can focus on more as I go on.

Thanks :-)