EURO 2016 – a very first preview

This Sunday the qualification groups for EURO 2016 will be drawn. This is reason enough to have a very first look at the chances of each team prior to the draw. As you may already expect, this will also allow us to gauge the difficulty of the draw for each team.

I don’t want to bore you with all the gory details of how I came up with the results below. If you are a regular reader of my posts you may have already an idea. Otherwise, I encourage you to check out my posts under Stats in Soccer – especially the posts on ‘Analyzing Soccer Tournaments’ but also the World Cup Preview posts. Here are just the basics:

1. As with my World Cup Preview, I used an aggregated rating derived in equal parts from the FIFA rating, the Elo rating, the SPI rating and odds for an outright EURO 2016 win averaged over 7 online bookmakers. The ratings were compiled on January 31, 2014.
2. Since we do not know anything but the pots for the qualification groups, I simulated the entire EURO 2016 tournament including qualification 500 000 times. At each run, I generated a qualification draw, simulated the games for each of the qualification groups including home field advantage, determined the final table within the group and thus determined if teams qualified, qualified for the playoff or did not qualify. I then, simulated the playoffs with the seeding determined by an approximation of the UEFA national team coefficient. This coefficient was re-calculated after the playoffs to determine the seeding for the actual EURO 2016 draw. Then, at a last step I simulated the entire final. tournament. I know, this is pretty involved, but as realistic as possible when using my model.
3. During each simulation run, I kept track of where a team exited the tournament and thus determined the probability of a team reaching any stage in the tournament. These stages are coded as follows:

   PO  - playoff
   Q   - qualified for the final tournament
   G3  - finished third in the EURO 2016 group stage but did not qualify for 2nd round
   R2  - qualified for the second round
   QF  - qualified for the quarter final
   SF  - qualified for the semifinal
   F   - qualified for the final
   1st - won the tournament

4. Due to the 500 000 repetitions, all the numbers cited below are correct within 0.0015, the so-called margin of error.

The table below summarizes the probabilities for each team of reaching at least one of the 8 stages listed above (i.e. at least qualify for the final tournament, at least qualify for the semifinal, …). The teams are sorted in descending order by their probability to qualify for EURO 2016 (that is the second column of numbers). I know it may be a bit hard to read, but I tried to structure the table by splitting it into categories:

       PO     Q    G3    R2    QF    SF    F     1st
---------------------- qualified ---------------------
01 FRA ----- 1.000 0.965 0.945 0.700 0.467 0.279 0.160
-------------- almost certainly qualified ------------
02 ESP 0.999 0.997 0.975 0.962 0.763 0.554 0.388 0.259
03 GER 0.998 0.994 0.965 0.949 0.721 0.492 0.320 0.194
---------------- very likely qualified ---------------
04 NED 0.991 0.978 0.917 0.884 0.574 0.320 0.166 0.077
05 ITA 0.986 0.969 0.896 0.856 0.524 0.277 0.134 0.058
06 POR 0.984 0.966 0.889 0.847 0.512 0.269 0.129 0.055
07 ENG 0.983 0.964 0.881 0.834 0.492 0.255 0.120 0.050
------------------ likely qualified ------------------
08 BEL 0.974 0.941 0.851 0.798 0.456 0.231 0.105 0.043
09 RUS 0.952 0.911 0.777 0.709 0.341 0.145 0.055 0.018
10 GRE 0.940 0.891 0.749 0.678 0.312 0.125 0.044 0.014
11 SUI 0.942 0.885 0.747 0.675 0.323 0.138 0.053 0.017
12 BIH 0.916 0.856 0.691 0.612 0.256 0.095 0.031 0.009
13 CRO 0.920 0.850 0.691 0.613 0.270 0.106 0.037 0.011
14 UKR 0.899 0.819 0.647 0.566 0.232 0.086 0.027 0.008
15 SWE 0.887 0.800 0.616 0.531 0.210 0.075 0.023 0.006
16 CZE 0.861 0.765 0.562 0.474 0.175 0.059 0.017 0.004
17 DEN 0.854 0.756 0.554 0.467 0.170 0.056 0.016 0.004
18 SRB 0.832 0.703 0.496 0.419 0.159 0.055 0.016 0.004
19 TUR 0.754 0.604 0.400 0.327 0.106 0.031 0.008 0.002
20 IRL 0.716 0.582 0.344 0.271 0.074 0.019 0.004 0.001
21 ROU 0.706 0.546 0.346 0.277 0.082 0.022 0.005 0.001
22 AUT 0.698 0.538 0.328 0.261 0.077 0.021 0.005 0.001
23 HUN 0.670 0.530 0.311 0.242 0.061 0.014 0.003 0.000
24 SVN 0.655 0.490 0.278 0.218 0.059 0.015 0.003 0.001
------------ likely qualified for play-off ----------- 
25 POL 0.595 0.429 0.218 0.168 0.041 0.009 0.002 0.000
26 SCO 0.547 0.414 0.226 0.177 0.049 0.012 0.003 0.000
27 SVK 0.566 0.399 0.199 0.152 0.036 0.008 0.001 0.000
28 NOR 0.567 0.399 0.203 0.154 0.036 0.008 0.001 0.000
---------------- likely not qualified ----------------
29 ISR 0.537 0.372 0.181 0.136 0.030 0.006 0.001 0.000
30 ARM 0.449 0.320 0.162 0.123 0.029 0.006 0.001 0.000
31 BUL 0.429 0.302 0.144 0.108 0.024 0.005 0.001 0.000
32 FIN 0.428 0.301 0.143 0.108 0.024 0.005 0.001 0.000
33 MNE 0.368 0.249 0.114 0.084 0.017 0.003 0.001 0.000
34 WAL 0.363 0.246 0.107 0.079 0.016 0.003 0.000 0.000
35 BLR 0.338 0.224 0.094 0.069 0.013 0.002 0.000 0.000
36 ISL 0.253 0.165 0.066 0.048 0.009 0.001 0.000 0.000
37 ALB 0.230 0.148 0.057 0.041 0.007 0.001 0.000 0.000
38 MKD 0.193 0.121 0.043 0.031 0.005 0.001 0.000 0.000
39 EST 0.161 0.093 0.028 0.019 0.002 0.000 0.000 0.000
40 LVA 0.148 0.084 0.025 0.017 0.002 0.000 0.000 0.000
41 GEO 0.140 0.083 0.027 0.018 0.002 0.000 0.000 0.000
42 LTU 0.137 0.081 0.025 0.017 0.002 0.000 0.000 0.000
43 AZE 0.110 0.063 0.018 0.012 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000
44 NIR 0.102 0.058 0.016 0.011 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000
-------------- very likely not qualified -------------
45 MDA 0.082 0.045 0.012 0.008 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000
46 CYP 0.057 0.030 0.007 0.005 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
47 KAZ 0.032 0.016 0.003 0.002 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
------------ almost certainly not qualified ----------
48 LUX 0.015 0.008 0.001 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
49 MLT 0.013 0.006 0.001 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
50 LIE 0.009 0.004 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
51 FRO 0.008 0.004 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
52 GIB 0.005 0.002 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
53 AND 0.002 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
-------------------- not qualified -------------------
54 SMR 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000

As we can see, only one nation, the hosts France, qualified so far (and thus appears in bold face). The next two on the list, Spain and Germany have such a small chance of not qualifying (less than 1%), that we can assume that they will qualify almost certainly. For the next five nations (the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal and England), qualification is quite secure with the chances of failing to qualify being less than 5%. The next partition of the table are the teams that most likely will complete the field of qualified teams, followed by the teams that most likely will reach the playoffs but fail to qualify. The rest of the teams likely will not qualify (but of course do have chance to do so), so I display them in italics. I do partition the rest of the table in a similar manner as the top indicating which teams have less than a 5% chance to qualify and which ones have less than a 1% chance to qualify. The last in the list, San Marino, has of course a mathematical chance to qualify, but its probability to do so is less than 0.0005. Hence, I call San Marino as the first nation to not qualify even before any game is played. But that is also not surprising.

All in all, the table in itself may not reveal any big surprises, but it still offers an interesting glimpse into the upcoming European Championship. Note also that the first 13 nations in the list are also the 13 nations that qualified for the 2014 World Cup. I think it also interesting to see that there are three clear favorites as of now to win EURO 2016: in this order Spain (25.6%), Germany (19.4%) and France (16.2%) with a clear drop afterwards. Finally, note that as we approach the cutoff of the Top 24 teams, the gap between reaching the playoffs and actually qualifying opens considerably.

Well, that was it for a first preview. I am planning to update this table once we know the actual qualification groups and of course will keep updating as qualification moves along.