The knockout stage offers up two very different brackets. By finishing second, England have increased their chances. But Mexico are in for a tough ride.
The World Cup has a habit of creating strange incentives at the end of the group stage. In 1982, West Germany and Austria famously sleepwalked through the majority of a 1-0 German victory in their final group match, one which pushed them through at the expense of an Algeria team which had won the previous day. To prevent that from happening again, FIFA began to play the final matches from each group concurrently.
On Thursday, we saw the method’s limitations. With Colombia beating Senegal, Japan recognized that they would be able to go through to the knockout round under FIFA’s Fair Play tiebreaker by avoiding yellow and red cards. They and an already-eliminated Poland side played the last 20 minutes of their match with the intensity of two teams trying not to wake up a sleeping child.
For Belgium and England, the die was cast before their match ever began. With both teams guaranteed to go through and, even on every single FIFA tiebreaker, both sides knew the consequences of winning. A draw would see the winner of the group determined by either the Fair Play tiebreaker or, barring any gap there, a drawing of lots. The winner of the group would end up on the tough side of the bracket, likely facing a quarterfinal appearance against Brazil and a semifinal against Argentina, France, or Portugal.
The loser, on the other hand, might not encounter anybody tougher than Spain on their side of the bracket, and even the Iberian side would have to wait until the semifinal. Both teams rightly saw the benefits in losing and turned over virtually their entire starting XIs. When England went down 1-0 to a goal by Adnan Januzaj, UK bookmakers improved their odds of winning the tournament from 8-1 to 6-1. England lost. So they won. I think.
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While some will fret about England losing their momentum heading into the knockout round, there isn’t much in the way of recent evidence suggesting a 3-0 group stage is a precursor to World Cup glory. Gareth Southgate was also able to rest many of his primary contributors in advance of the round of 16, where the Three Lions will go up against Colombia. A win, on the other hand, would have placed them against the less-fancied Japan team, which ranks 45 spots below Colombia in 61st in the most recent FIFA rankings.
Should England have been so desperate to end up on the easier side of the bracket just two years after they were eliminated in a similar situation by Iceland? Is the trade-off of a more difficult round of 16 matchup for an easier path to the final worth it? How difficult is that side of the bracket, anyway? Is Belgium — or any team from that side of the 16 — facing a historically-difficult path to the final? Let’s find out.
We’ll never truly know whether England should have benched most of their starters against Belgium. The only way we could be sure Southgate made the wrong move would have been if he had played his first-choice XI and lost while seeing an irreplaceable star like Harry Kane go down with a tournament-ending injury. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. To estimate England’s chances in either scenario, we can use the win probabilities generated by FiveThirtyEight using the Soccer Power Index to figure out England’s chances of advancing on either side of the bracket.
In the round of 16, England are guaranteed to have a tougher matchup than they would if they had won against Belgium. Colombia simply more top-level talent than Japan; even if you removed the clearly-unfit James Rodriguez from the equation, the 22 men remaining in Colombia’s national team are worth more than twice as much as Japan’s 23-man roster, per Transfermarkt.
Fivethirtyeight, without knowing about Rodriguez’s fitness, estimates that England have a 60 percent chance of winning against Colombia on July 3. On the other hand, if they had finished top and faced Japan, their chances of winning and advancing would be 72 percent. That’s a significant difference and if England go out in the round of 16, Southgate’s going to be slaughtered in the press for rotating his team against Belgium.
Once we get to the quarterfinals, though, we begin to see why England find themselves in better shape. In their current bracket, a victorious Kane and company would be favored to beat either of their possible opponents, Switzerland (62 percent chance of winning for England) or Sweden (63 percent). Had they faced Japan and won, though, they would get the winner of Brazil and Mexico, which is likely to be the South American giants, against whom England would have just a 36 percent chance of advancing. Fivethirtyeight assigns them a 67 percent chance of beating Mexico, far closer to their chances against Switzerland and Sweden.
If they make it to the quarterfinals of their current bracket, England have a 62.5 percent shot of moving on. If they were on the other side, though, their chances of advancing to the semifinals would only come in at 41.3 percent.
After that point, England’s odds in the semifinals would be relatively similar regardless of which bracket they’re in. In this version of reality, their most likely opponent is Spain, who Fivethirtyeight sees as favorites against England (38 percent win expectancy for England) despite a middling performance in the group stages. Southgate’s team would otherwise be favored against Croatia, Denmark, or their Russian hosts. They would have a 47.6 percent shot of making it from the semifinals to the final in Moscow.
Having made it past Brazil in the alternate reality, England would be essentially a coinflip against each of their four possible semifinal opponents, ranging from France (47 percent chance of winning for England) to Uruguay (56 percent), with Argentina (50 percent) and Portugal (52 percent) in between. England would have a 50.7 percent chance of advancing out of this final four to the final at the Luzhniki on July 15.
And then, in the World Cup final, England would be an underdog on both sides of the bracket, although not by much. In this reality, the likelihood of England facing Brazil in the final leaves them with a 45.2 percent shot of coming away with their first title since 1966. If they were on the other side of the bracket and facing the likes of Spain or Belgium in the final, their chances of winning a one-off final would improve to 49.0 percent.
In three of the four knockout rounds, England’s odds would have been better by winning against Belgium and heading into the more difficult side of the bracket. By using conditional probability, though, we can see that the chances of playing Brazil in the quarterfinals on that side of the bracket make it more advantageous for England to have lost.
In all, while Southgate’s team has a greater shot of crashing out after four matches in the round of 16, England increased their chances of winning the tournament by about 9.5 percent (0.7 percentage points) through losing to Belgium on Thursday. Their cumulative schedule isn’t easier — Belgium actually has a slightly easier slate if we include the final — but avoiding Brazil for as long as possible is the best possible path for England to exceed expectations in Russia.
We can calculate the difficulty of each team’s path towards the World Cup by using a combination of those advancement probabilities from FiveThirtyEight and the World Football ELO ratings, which uses the ELO system most commonly seen with regards to chess to rate each country’s effectiveness. The system has data on international matches going back through 1930 and, crucially, its website displays ELO ratings for each country heading into each World Cup. More on that later.
Each team has already played three countries, so they’ve already been subject to some dramatically different degrees of difficulty. Through the group stage, Switzerland’s opposition has faced an average ELO of 1888, which is the toughest among the 16 qualifiers and roughly equivalent to, well, playing Switzerland three times in a row. (Note that these numbers are all pre-tournament figures.)
Uruguay, meanwhile, have gone up against opposition with an average ELO of just 1638, which would be slightly worse than the pre-tournament ELO of Egypt (1646).
Using those probabilities, we can estimate each team’s path to (and through) the final and the difficulty of the schedule they might face along the way. As an example, England have the 12th-most difficult slate of the 16 remaining teams. Here’s how we would calculate their overall strength of schedule, including the group stage and the knockout rounds.
