Football is beautiful, but the World Cup is pretty much statistically meaningless–tremendous fun, but meaningless. Any tournament with a three-game first round and single elimination thereafter won’t tell us much, especially when we’re talking about a low-scoring sport contested on an expansive playing surface. Yes, the better teams tend to make it into the later rounds, but there’s no way this type of system is deciding which of them is truly best. And trying to handicap the semifinals and finals is a fool’s errand, as the FiveThirtyEight site just learned. The opening of its Brazil-Germany prediction piece: 

“On Tuesday, Brazil and Germany kick off the World Cup semifinals, where there are no real party-crashers to be found. Including A Seleção and Die Mannschaft, four of the top five teams in the pre-Cup Elo ratings are still active in the tournament. Sorry, Spain.

With such evenly matched squads — and the ever-present specter of randomness — barring a huge blowout, the final four games of the World Cup are unlikely to provide much of a referendum on which side is truly the world’s best. But at the same time, the absence of a longshot entry boosts the chances that one of the remaining four teams is in fact the “true” best team in the field. More important, it also increases the odds that we’ll see a pair of exciting, close matches at the doorstep of the World Cup final.

IN DEPTH

Brazil was the World Cup favorite before the tournament began, and its championship chances still rank first according to the FiveThirtyEight model. Our official projections even say there’s a 73 percent probability that Brazil will beat Germany Tuesday and advance to the final. But those numbers don’t know that the gifted Brazilian striker Neymar will miss the rest of the tournament with a broken vertebra, an injury he sustained against Colombia in the quarterfinals. If we account for his absence (and that of his teammate Thiago Silva, who racked up two yellow cards and must sit out Tuesday’s match), Brazil’s chances of beating Germany drop to somewhere near 65 percent, numbers fueled in large part simply by the match’s location on Brazilian soil.”