Tonight already the Semifinals are about to start, and tomorrow The Netherlands will be playing against England. The big question though: “Will unstoppable AI bring it home to the Netherlands?” AI is on the roll again after predicting the victory against Turkey. It will be interesting to find out what the prediction will be for tomorrow’s game. History is telling us that it will be close.
The history of the Netherlands against England goes way back up until 1907 when the first game between these two countries was played in Den Haag. Some interesting facts about the history:
- The biggest win ever was for England on the 12th of December in 1907, 12 – 2, with 5 goals scored by William J Stapley.
- The last official game was during the Nations League tournament, also a Semifinal, where the Dutch team won 1-3 after extra time.
A couple of things beforehand, the whole configuration of the table, preparation of the data, and building of the custom model can be found in this blog article.
Data
There is a great history between The Netherlands and England games. Of course, there is not enough data to have a solid prediction so therefore the data is replicated again. All matches are included and transformed to the previously used format. It would still be great to receive feedback when it comes to improving the model
Data Source: Netherlands national football team: record v England (11v11.com)
Will unstoppable AI bring it home
Now let’s find out what the AI Builder prediction model will predict for the match against England, will it be:
- Win, W, 806650000
- Draw, D, 806650001
- Lost, L, 806650002
We run the Power Automate Flow that is described in the previous blog article, with the following input:
- Opponent = England
- Where = Home
- Type = Tournament
- Last2Decades = Yes
Even though the AI Prediction model thinks it is unstoppable, it does predict 806650001 which is mapped to D(Draw). So this means that according to the AI Builder prediction model, The Netherlands will draw the game against England, with a Likelihood score of 0.4709. The issue is, of course, we need a winner.
When looking at the statistics of penalty series during a Euro or World Cup, both countries are not doing a great job:
- England played 10 penalty series, they Won 3 and Lost 7 which is a win rate of 30%
- The Netherlands played 7 penalty series, they Won 2 and Lost 5 which is a win rate 28%
So based on the data you would perhaps expect that the England team is in favor, but my orange heart will say The Netherlands of course.
Enjoy watching the game everyone
