The FIFA Women’s World Cup moves to the knockout rounds where 16 survivors from the original 24 teams compete in single-elimination contests.
Search for “Women’s World Cup” on Bing for scores, standings and schedules. You’ll also get interesting facts and context on the event, videos, and top players to know.
As an update from our initial post, Bing Predicts correctly called the group winner in all six groups and 13 of the 16 teams which would advance. Further, all 11 teams we assigned >1 percent probability to win the contest are still in contention. With a slight re-ordering of match-ups, we have updated our models to show the predicted winners using the bracket after the group round, where we still forecast Germany over the United States in a close contest in one semifinal, and England still as a third semifinalist.
The key difference is that Bing predicted a group round win by Sweden over Australia, which resulted in a tie. That outcome swaps the positions of Sweden and Australia in the bracket, resulting in a first-round match between Sweden and Germany and preventing both of these teams from reaching the semifinals. With this change, along with a quirk in bracket scheduling, No. 1 Germany has the unusual task of possibly playing No. 5 Sweden, No. 3 France, and No. 2 USA before even reaching the finals.
Full results of our updated bracket are shown here.
Individually, we were 21 for 36 in match predictions: five incorrect teams and 10 ties where we picked a team to win. The 58 percent level is similar to the accuracy Bing had in the men’s group rounds for last year’s World Cup (63 percent for that, which included the correct choice out of three possible outcomes in each game), where we were then able to go 15-1 moving forward in the knockout rounds.
We predict that the US will have a good run, continuing their streak of being the only team to reach the semi-finals of every Women’s World Cup, but their match-up against Germany will be a difficult one at that stage.
Also, for those of you who can’t get enough sports on Bing, congratulations to the Golden State Warriors who we picked before the playoffs began to take the championship, and commiserations to last year’s champions from San Antonio, whose first-round exit in 7 games we also predicted.
– Walter Sun (Bing Predicts) and Cornelia Carapcea (Bing Sports)