Celebrating Ten Years of Soccer Mad Boffins with a Euro 2024 Tournament Prediction

It was June 2014 when we founded this blog. The launch coincided not only with our FIFA scholarship to research the business and administrative history of the 1966 FIFA World Cup, but also with the start of that years FIFA World Cup, the 20th edition of the tournament hosted in Brazil.

We followed the tournament with various comments and fun posts and who could predict that we would still be going strong in 2024!?

Speaking of predictions, the first time that we attempted to predict the scores and outcomes of a football tournament was the following edition, Russia 2018.  Which leads us nicely to the present.

Today, Friday 14th June, is the start of the UEFA European Championship. Of the British teams, Scotland face Germany on the opening evening, whilst England play Serbia on Sunday 16th.

BBC pundits generally favour England or France to win the cup which can you read by.following this link.

Sky Sports report betting odds also favour the cross-channel rivals but show that Germany and Portugal are close behind, see here.

The NY Times in collaboration with The Athletic has a more statistical approach, showing Germany as having a squad 'built to win', Portugal as 'having worked the goalkeeeper more than any other team' and Belgium's Lokaku as being a top striker.  England, they sneer dismissively, will be heavily reliant on Harry Kane's goals. See here.

Being free thinkers, we make our own predictions, as well as randomly rolling a dice as a control test.  Using our football knowledge and gut instinct, we have some interesting ideas:

On the group games for Scotland and England:

Scotland

Game	AG	KT	Dice
Germany v Scotland	0-2	1-1	0-3
Scotland v Switzerland	3-2	0-1	1-4
Scotland v Hungary	1-0	2-1	3-0

 

England

Game	AG	KT	Dice
Serbia v England	0-3	1-1	1-0
Denmark v England	0-2	0-2	2-6
England v Slovenia	5-0	1-1	2-0

 

Regarding tournament progress, both Alex and Kevin see the Brits as qualifying from their respective groups, itself a huge achievement for the Scottish bravehearts, but are less confident in England than the professional pundits or bookmakers, predicting a Quarter Final exit.  The dice rolled that both nations will crash out in the Round of 16.

Progress

Team	AG	KT	Dice
Scotland	R16	R16	R16
England	QF	QF	R16

The UK General Election will be held just days after the round of 16. As we reported in our 2021 chapter on sport and populism Harold Wilson lost the 1970 General Election just days after England crashed out of the 1970 World Cup to Germany. Rishi Sunak must be pretty confident that England will progress to the Quarter Finals too!

In terms of who will win the tournament:

Winners

Alex (AG) : France (winners), Portugal (runner-up)

Kevin (KT): Portugal (winners), Croatia (runner-up)

Dice: Croatia (winners), Ukraine (runner-up)

Over to YOU

Who do YOU think will win? How far do YOU think that England or Scotland can go? Please leave us a comment below.

PS: We hope that you enjoy the Euro 2024 tournament and in celebrating 2014-2024 of Soccer Mad Boffins.  Please read the above article for fun, we offer no advice nor encouragement for betting/gambling on the tournament and do this prediction exercise solely for entertainment and to see if we can be more accurate than the pundits!