Goldman Sachs 6 月 11 日长篇英文报告，49 页。
       对世界杯感兴趣的经济人，有空可以参考参考。
　　When Lionel Messi observed that“in football…talent and elegance mean nothing without rigor and precision”，he was clearly thinking as much about the econometrics behind forecasting the score as the tactics behind winning the match.But while selecting the best starting eleven requires human judgment and experience，choosing the best variables to predict the outcome of a game is better left to a statistical model.Or more prec isely，200，000 models：harnessing recent developments in“machine learning，”we mine data on team characteristics and individual players to work out which factors help to predict match scores.This gives us a large number of forecasts，which are combined to produce an overall projection.We then simulate 1，000，000 possible evolutions of the tournament to gauge the probability of each team progressing through the rounds.