Yahoo and Tumblr hope to continue successful Euro 2016 predictions with England win over Wales
Social media experts at Yahoo and Tumblr are looking to build on the success of their Euro 2016 predictions for today’s (16 June) highly anticipated Anglo-Welsh fixture, which appears to be leaning in England’s favour.
Using a combination of team performance data and comments from millions of football fans online, research scientists at Yahoo and Tumblr are forecasting a victory for Roy Hodgson’s team when they take on Wales in Lens this afternoon.
Social media is unsurprisingly awash with predictions, and many fans instead prefer to look to experienced football commentators for words of comfort in how the game may pan out. However Yahoo and Tumblr already have one over on the pundits having gone against popular opinion that England would beat Russia when they correctly predicted a 1-1 draw.
By analysing 24 million blogs – with more than 20 billion Tumblr posts over the first five months of 2016 – and combining with Yahoo Sport data, the analysts have predicted a 2-1 win for England.
Discussing the methodology, Yahoo’s head of sport, Ian Nolan, said: “We gave traditional data-driven score line predictions a twist by using insight drawn from Tumblr users’ social signals and they’ve proved more accurate than many of the professional pundits so far.
“This just goes to show how powerful big data can be - in this case Yahoo Sports’ data and the voices of millions of passionate Tumblr fan bloggers. Pundits and analysts may know a lot, but it seems that you cannot ignore the wisdom of crowds.”
Yahoo predicts England will make it all the way to the semis, even overcoming Portugal in the quarter finals. The full methodology and list of Euro 2016 predictions can be found here.
For more Euro 2016 related media and marketing stories visit The Drum's Euro 2016 hub here.