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ESPN Can Predict The Future. Posted: 11 Nov 2009 12:40 PM PST ESPN has taken more than their fair share of stick for their football/soccer coverage, and for good reason. They’re American (despite dubbing themselves The Global Leader) and, by and large, they do American sports well. Others: not so much. But they’ve gone off-script with their latest venture, the Soccer Power Index, designed to render World Cup 2010 moot. Much like every other acronym in the sporting world, they’ve compiled a list of rankings designed to tell us the fairest in the land. Unlike the other rankings systems, they don’t want the answer to the here and now. No, they want the future. And don’t we all. Why rate the teams at all? Well, from my perspective, we do it not because we’re interested in the past, but because we’re interested in the future. The SPI ratings are intended to be forward-looking. They’re intended to be predictive; every variable in the SPI has been tuned to give you the best possible objective and statistical forecast of how a team will perform in South Africa. It’s a novel idea, yet one ultimately doomed to failure as that is simply the nature of football rankings system. The methodologies require a four year major in SoccerPowerIndexology and it wouldn’t be imprudent to sail into the doctorate program as well. But then no one said predicting the future would be easy. So from this we can decipher… Brazil will win number 6, which most should be predicting anyway. Fabio Capello’s semifinal or bust ultimatum wasn’t so imprudent, what with Peter Crouch scoring a perfect hat trick in the Third Placed Game. Diego Maradona will be canned, resign or die from bloating in the next 8 months, as there’s no way in hell they’re making it to the quarters with him on the sidelines. Italy & France will get bounced in the Round of 16 and both will deny that South Africa 2010 ever happened, much like 2002. Bonus prediction: Raymond Domenech will keep his job. Croatia will nearly make it out of the group stages, despite not traveling to South Africa. Presumably based entirely on Slaven Bilic’s coolness. The only African team to make it to the knockouts will be, rather disappointingly, Cameroon, where they will not win a game. Home advantage is a myth. South Africa: 65th. And all this makes the rankings both curious and brilliant, as they house a built-in mechanism which renders them near inarguable. Can you predict the future better than them? Are you the reincarnation of Nostradamus? Didn’t think so. Well, there is one argument easily made: Guus Hiddink won’t win one in the knockouts with Russia? Bullshit.

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