Soccer aficionados — journalists, fans and coaches — have been shown to be no more successful at predicting FIFA World Cup outcomes than people with no knowledge of the game, although they’re much more confident of their predictions, report Nikola Erceg and Zvonimir Galic of the University of Zagreb in Croatia. In one study, aficionados and those with no knowledge were only as accurate about match outcomes as if they had guessed randomly.

(Source: Journal of Economic Psychology)

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, July 28th, 2014