How much luck do you need to win the World Cup?
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Hello and thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast. We're the programme that looks at the numbers in the news, life and in that sport that definitely starts with the word foot. And I'm Lizzie McNeill. Now, unless you've been blissfully far away from any screens, radios, pubs, flags or indeed people, you'll have noticed that there's been a bit more football around than usual. Yes, after five weeks and over 100 matches, we've reached the dramatic final of the 2026 World Cup. Doubtless, both teams have worked extremely hard to reach this point. But loyal listener Mike Ghent got in touch to ask whether there might be another factor at play here. And no, we don't mean interfering state leaders. He wanted to know about luck.
Given England and Scotland's sojourn in the World Cup, it made me think, how much luck do you need to win the World Cup? Has anyone ever tried to quantify luck?
So, how important is luck in winning the World Cup? Does the better team always win, or could a worse team steal victory from the jaws of defeat? First of all, we need to define what we mean by luck. So we armed ourselves with our trusty four-leaf clovers, rabbit's feet and other totemic objects and contacted Ian Graham, former head of research at Liverpool Football Club.
Yeah, so genuine luck is something completely outside the team's control. But that's not usually what we think about when we think about luck. Luck really is a shorthand for things that are difficult to predict, things that are difficult to control.
It happens that football is one of the least predictable ball sports there is.
And the real reason driving that is the low scoring nature of the game. So in football, there's typically 2.5 to 3 goals per game. And whether a chance becomes a goal or not is very uncertain. If you compare that to a game like basketball, which has hundreds of scoring events per game, or a game like tennis, where it has hundreds of points per tennis match. The low score in nature of football leads it to being not very predictable, or we could say leads it to having a higher percentage of games whose outcome is more down to luck than down to skill.
If this is true, and it really is based on luck, then you'd expect to see the underdog win in football more so than in other sports. So, do you? Luckily for us, mathematician Luis Nunez-Vincente from Lehigh University ran a study to test just that.
So we basically collected a major match data set with more than 5,000 matches involving 12 sports, all the competitions, World Cups and Olympics since 1970 until 2023. And these were 12 ball sports. Then we also developed what we mean by weak in a match. A team is weak if it is a certain number of positions that we calculated statistically below its opponent. And then we come up with an underdog achievement just by summing all the wins and the ties of the weak teams divided by all the matches played by the weak teams. And that gave us a score, an underdog achievement score.
And what were the results?
We come up with two major conclusions. One is that, indeed, soccer is one of the sports with the highest underdog achievement. And secondly, it's one of the sports where there's a great influence of randomness, meaning luck.
So, how does that all play out in a tournament like the World Cup? Is it Ibuki's dream of luck above all else? Well, according to David Sumter, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Uppsala University, yeah... Kind of.
And when I work together with football clubs, what I'll do is I'll say, you really can't tell anything from a single match. We always work on the principle of looking at five matches. And only after you've got five matches, really, can you draw any conclusions about how well the team are performing. And in a World Cup setting, that's a very difficult truth. Because if you think about the last 32 down to the final, that's just five matches as well. So we really can't tell which are the best teams over those five matches. And a bit of randomness can knock out any one of those teams.
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