Many will see June 11 2021 as the start of the summer of sport with Euro 2020. In what would appear to be at odds with the current climate of Covid lockdowns and travel restrictions, the biggest tournament – in terms of participants – is being played across the whole of Europe in the first pan-European schedule in its history.
The tournament welcomes the usual powerhouses including Spain, France and Germany, but we also have some unfamiliar faces including Slovakia, North Macedonia and Hungary. From a home nations point of view, there is a lot of interest, with England being one of the favourites and Scotland joining previous semi finalists Wales.
To celebrate the tournament, the RSS Statistics in Sport Section is running a competition whereby we are looking for you to predict the outcomes of the games. The rules are as follows:
- You must use publicly available data
- Predictions must be made for all group games and all possible knockout games
- Code and data must be supplied on submission and results need to be reproducible by the judging panel
Thats it – you can use whatever methods you want, but your goal should be to minimise the log-score for all predictions. You can participate as an individual or as part of a team – whatever works for you. More information on the rules, log-score metric, submission template and how to get involved can be found at https://github.com/mberk/rss-euro-2020-prediction-competition
As with any competition, there are prizes and we will have first and second place based on the lowest log-score, but we will also have a prize for best method as determined by the judging panel. All winners will be invited to present their work at this year's RSS conference, with reasonable expenses covered and appropriately tacky trophies for all winners!
Submissions must be made before kick-off of the first game, 20:00 BST on 11 June 2021.