[dasil003]

Sure those are just basic stats and could be improved probably, but they do reflect the reality that Brazil should have won; they got unlucky with an own goal, and they made some key mistakes at critical times, failing to finish great chances.

You're not going to find a statistical approach that will account for the subtleties that led to this outcome. The problem with soccer stats in general is that everything hinges on low-frequency events based on subtle differences of timing and space.

Basketball by comparison is much more stat-rich, and there are a lot of cool advanced analytics, but even still they are full of gaps that are obvious to any expert watching the game. Afterwards maybe you can find the statistical signature of something you saw, but then you risk overfitting again, just the same as soccer.

[thaumasiotes]

> You're not going to find a statistical approach that will account for the subtleties that led to this outcome. The problem with soccer stats in general is that everything hinges on low-frequency events based on subtle differences of timing and space.

I think this deserves to be elaborated a bit: a game in which 1 is a good score, and often a game-winning score, is never going to be accurately predicted based on a statistical approach, because scoring is too rare for a statistical approach to work well. Low scores mean that individual games have an extremely large element of chance.

Imagine one team is about 4% better than another team; they should be favored about 51-49 to score a point. If a game scored 300 points, that difference would be perceptible within one game. But to resolve the same difference accurately in games that score 3 points each takes many, many, many games.