Intense speculation from gamblers and non-gamblers alike have often led to interesting outcomes. Brazil is by popular opinion the big 'hot door', but personally, it is quite likely that this will happen again.
For those with economic flair and an interest in soccer, you might find Greg Mankiw's Blog: The World Cup to be stimulating.
Goldman's figure...shows a strong correlation between World Cup ranking and GDP per person. Being rich and having a good team go hand in hand.
According to this list, the countries up there do indeed have a higher FIFA ranking. Heck, when the US is 8th in GDP per capita and 5th in FIFA rankings, what can you say? Yet, *surprisingly* Luxembourg tops the GDP ranks but its soccer team is nowhere to be seen.
The other anomaly is that Brazil ranks 74 in GDP per capita and Argentina is 67th, while they are respectively the 1st and 9th in the FIFA rankings. Interesting of note, however, is that the rankings for total nominal GDP for Brazil and Argentina rise to 11th and 34th, which better reflect the general correlation between Football (Soccer) performance and having the big bucks.
The general correlation seems to ignore the outliers and obliterates the question of causality. Even though there may be plausible theories related to opportunity cost, income effect, substitution effect and so on, the biggest factor in play here is customer preference. In some places, people love football. They live, feed and die on football, while Americans misunderstood it as another sport and funnily enough, enjoy bumping into each other all the time.
Finally, a few pointers from Elaine on how to choose a team to support (especially if you're a 'football widow' AND all of the above bores you AND you managed somehow to survive till here). My favourite is this:
8. support the team wearing your favourite colour
unfortunately it could be a bit rare to come across a team in pink.
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