Today I wanted to mess around with predicting the outcomes of friendly matches. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I finally decided to give it a shot.
First, I needed some data. I mean, you can’t really predict anything without knowing what happened in the past, right? So I spent a good chunk of the morning gathering results from previous friendly matches. I just went online, looked up a bunch of football websites, and started copying and pasting scores into a spreadsheet. It was pretty tedious, I won’t lie.
Once I had a decent amount of data, I started thinking about what factors might influence the outcome of a friendly match. Obviously, team strength is a big one. I figured I could use some kind of ranking system for that. Then there’s stuff like home advantage, recent form, maybe even the weather, although I wasn’t sure how to quantify that last one.
I decided to keep it simple for this first attempt. I just used the difference in rankings between the two teams and whether the match was played at home or away. I cooked up a basic formula that took these factors into account and spat out a predicted score.
To test it out, I picked a few upcoming friendly matches and ran them through my formula. I also made my own personal predictions, just based on gut feeling. Let’s just say my formula and I had some… disagreements.
- Match 1: Formula predicted a draw, I predicted a win for the home team.
- Match 2: Formula said the away team would win, I went for a narrow home victory.
- Match 3: We both agreed on a draw, so at least there’s that.
I’m not gonna lie, it was pretty fun to see how these predictions stacked up against each other. Obviously, this is all very rough and unrefined. There’s a ton of stuff I didn’t take into account, and my formula is about as basic as it gets. I felt pretty satisfied, even though it’s far from perfect.
Next, I think I’ll try to incorporate more data, maybe look at recent match results to gauge form. I might also play around with different formulas, see if I can come up with something a bit more accurate.
This is just the beginning. I’m pretty excited to see where this little project goes. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll have a model that can accurately predict the outcome of any friendly match. Or maybe I’ll just get frustrated and give up. Either way, it’s been a fun ride so far.
