FOOTBALL IS BACK! But then again, it didn’t ever really feel like it was gone with the FIFA World Cup in Russia bridging the summer gap. Sitting down to watch Panama v Tunisia helped football addicts around the world to get their fix, but now we’re back to the bread and butter of the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and all the cup competitions you could think of. Although, let’s not talk too much about the EFL Trophy.
In this article however, we hop in the time machine and travel back to May 2018 to look back at some of the predictions made by the pundits and check out how they fared.
Mark Lawrenson
The incredibly dour BBC pundit is the channels resident Mystic Meg, and every week he predicts the Premier League scores. Last season, a rather ingenious person on the internet collated all of his predictions and put them into a table format.
Bottom of the league was Huddersfield Town, with 3 points from 38 games and surprise, surprise, Liverpool were top. In the World Cup, Lawro predicted England to reach the quarter-finals and Brazil to win the tournament.
He also had Germany down as semi-finalists, who eventually crashed out in the group stages. Lawro has proven himself down the years to be a catastrophic failure when it comes to predictions, so let’s take a look at someone else.
Paul Merson
Wow, just wow. If Mark Lawrenson is bad at predictions, Paul Merson goes beyond the pale. At the beginning of June, speaking to Sky Sports Super 6 Merson argued that England could win the World Cup.
He also said that it was notoriously difficult to predict the World Cup top scorer, citing Paolo Rossi and Roger Milla as examples of that. He then went on to say that Raheem Sterling would win the golden boot.
The punters
Not only were the experts off the mark, but the punters were too. Bookmakers 888 Sport surveyed 1,000 people before the World Cup to find out their tip for the tournament. Below are some of the findings from the survey.
- 33% of people said that England would be the biggest disappointment of the tournament, and only 2% said that Germany would be.
- 28% of people said that Germany would win the World Cup and only 4% thought that France would.
- 4% of people picked Harry Kane as top scorer for the tournament.
Germany were the biggest disappointment of the tournament, exiting at the group stage and Harry Kane finished as top-scorer whilst France won the trophy. So it’s not just Paul Merson and Mark Lawrenson that got their predictions wrong.
Summary
It’s incredibly fun to look back at some of the predictions for the World Cup and laugh at the naivety of the pundits, but football is a tricky business. Who would have thought that Spain would be knocked out by pre-tournament laughing stock Russia?
So when you’re making your predictions for who will win the Champions League, who will finish top four in the Premier League. Have a think and remind yourself that nothing in football is easily predictable.
