Prediction. Forecast. World Cup in Africa!

“Baker City Herald” said: “PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — When Neven Subotic made his World Cup debut, it was in the red jersey of Serbia and not the blue uniform of the United States.

The central defender spent part of his youth growing up in Salt Lake City and played for the United States Under-17 and Under-20 teams. But after coach Thomas Rongen left him off the roster for the 2007 Under-20 World Cup, he switched allegiance to Serbia, part of the Yugoslav nation when he was born.”

And what do you know abot World Cup in South Africa? What do you think about Soccer Federation and Football?

This article compares the forecast accuracy of different methods, namely, prediction markets, tipsters and betting odds, and assesses the ability of prediction markets and tipsters to generate profits systematically in a betting market.

Prediction markets and betting odds perform equally well in terms of forecasting accuracy, but both methods strongly outperform tipsters. A weighting-based combination of the forecasts of these methods leads to a slightly higher forecast accuracy, whereas a rule-based combination improves forecast accuracy substantially. However, none of the forecasts leads to systematic monetary gains in betting markets because of the high fees (25%) charged by the state-owned
bookmaker. Lower fees (e.g., approximately 13% or 0%) would provide systematic profits if punters exploited the information from prediction markets and bet only on a selected number of games.

The availability of multiple forecasting methods raises questions about their effective use.

Previous studies consider the performance of betting odds and tipsters, respectively betting odds and prediction markets for sports forecasting, but knowledge about their comparative performance versus PMs remains scarce, because no studies compare all three forecasting methods.

Furthermore, little is known about the potential similarity of forecasts across methods, their performance or their ability to improve forecast accuracy if used in a weighting-based or rule-based combination. However, such knowledge is important because it might allow punters to systematically earn money on those markets. In addition, it provides recommendations for sports and betting companies on how to improve their forecasts. Therefore, this article empirically compares the forecast accuracy of PMs, tipsters and betting odds, as well as weighting- and rule-based combinations of those forecasts.

In consideration of the vast sums of money at stake in betting markets, we also determine whether the forecasts of the three methods or their combinations enable systematic profits. Thus, we contribute to the sports forecasting literature by providing the first large-scale empirical study of the three forecasting methods and their combinations in terms of their forecasting accuracy and ability to enable profits for punters in betting markets.

The remainder of this article is structured as follows: In Section 2, we describe the three forecasting methods, then use Section 3 to describe the data, the performance measures and the calculations required for the three expert forecasting methods. In Section 4, we compare the forecast accuracy of the three forecasting methods, as well as of their combinations. The final section concludes our site.