Women’s World Cup 2019: Who do the stats suggest will win the tournament in France?

We have reached the knockout stages of the Women’s World Cup, with the first round of 16 match kicking off with Germany v Nigeria on Saturday at 16:30 BST.

Pre-tournament favourites included defending champions the USA, alongside France, the Netherlands and Phil Neville’s England.

But with the routes to the final in Lyon on 7 July now decided, how has form and formation altered the nations’ chances?

Simon Gleave from data analysts Gracenote explains…

France remain favourites

Host nation France are still regarded as favourites despite a looming quarter-final tie against world number two the United States.

As France and the USA are likely to clash in the last eight, Germany are now second favourites to win the tournament.

The German team is in the bottom half of the draw which contains no other teams from the top four of the Fifa World Cup ranking.

• The French team has a 23% chance of lifting the trophy, very similar to their pre-tournament prospects.
• Germany have an 18% chance of winning the tournament after being confirmed in the bottom half of the draw, therefore avoiding all other teams ranked in the top four of the Fifa ranking until the World Cup final.
• The USA (15%) and England (12%) round off the big four favourites.
• There is around a 68% chance that this year’s World Cup winners will come from the quartet of France, Germany, USA and England.
• Results so far have improved the chance of the Netherlands winning the competition to 7%, making them fifth favourites ahead of Canada.
• The most likely teams to reach the quarter-finals are England (95% chance of beating Cameroon), Germany (93%), France (78%), USA (76%), Australia (58%), Canada (58%), the Netherlands (55%) and Italy (52%).

Great Britain among favourites for Olympic spots

The World Cup doubles up as Olympic qualifying for the European nations but there are only three spots available.

If multiple teams go out at the same time to leave fewer than three teams in the competition, there will also be an Olympic qualifying tournament for the last place(s).

With eight European teams remaining, France, Germany and Great Britain (England) are the favourites to represent Europe in the women’s football competition at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

How the predictions are worked out

• The ratings within the Fifa women’s ranking of football teams can be used to estimate the percentage chance of each match at the World Cup being a win, draw or loss for each of the teams.
• These percentages are then fed into a simulation of the World Cup which Gracenote runs a million times to produce estimates of the chance that each team reaches a particular stage of the competition.
• The simulation is run after each round of results to produce a new forecast