Can Euro qualifying matches help inform your predictions?

Can Euro qualifying matches help inform your predictions?

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HOW IMPORTANT ARE EURO QUALIFYING MATCHES?

International football is incredibly difficult for bettors to forecast. A Premier League team plays 38 matches a season, but an international side will take several years to complete that many fixtures.

Indeed, the first of England’s 38 matches prior to Euro 2024 was their 2-0 win over Germany at the previous edition of the tournament, three years earlier. To make it harder from a predictive perspective, almost a quarter of those matches were friendlies. 

And that’s before you stop to consider whether qualifying games in that period against the likes of Andorra, Malta and San Marino deserve to be labelled as competitive in the true sense of the word either.

Nonetheless, with an eye on the forthcoming European Championships we need to try to establish if a team’s form in qualifying has any impact on how they perform at the tournament itself, as the qualification matches provide a large proportion of an international side’s competitive football.  

Our quest is not aided by the ever-changing nature of the qualifying process. Euro 2024 will be the eighth edition of the championships since they switched to having a minimum of 16 teams in 1996, and there have been seven different formats of determining which countries made it to the finals in that time.

Even then, the two that shared an identical process were 12 years apart. However, despite the variety of methods used, there is always some breakdown of group winners, and then runners-up and/or playoff winners. 

For Euro 2024, there is the host Germany, 10 qualification group winners, 10 runners-up teams and a trio of playoff winners to make up the 24 nations who will be competing. 

Using data which is readily available from Wikipedia, we can see how teams from each of those brackets has performed over the previous six editions of the European Championships, to see if there are any themes which can guide our betting choices.

Euros qualifiers performance since Euro 2000

HOW WELL DO PLAYOFF QUALIFIERS PERFORM AT EUROS?

Three teams competing at Euro 2024 qualified via the playoffs: Georgia (reaching the tournament for the first time), Poland and Ukraine.

As you would expect by the fact that they had to take a lengthy route to reach the finals, playoff winners – who have featured at the last seven editions aside from Euro 2008 – do not have a track record of success.

Netherlands reached the last four in 2004, before their conquerors that year, Portugal, emulated them eight years later, only to come up short against eventual winners Spain.

However, it’s slim pickings aside from those two examples, with the collective 21 play-off winners from 2000 onwards only having a further two quarter-finalists to show for their efforts. At Euro 2020, none of the four even made it past the Group Stage.

This lack of success is reflected in Pinnacle’s odds for Euro 2024, as none of the four play-off winners are given more than a one percent chance of winning the tournament, and only Ukraine is forecast to reach the knock-out phase.

HOW WELL DO QUALIFYING GROUP RUNNERS-UP PERFORM AT EUROS?

Germany will welcome 10 teams to Euro 2024 who finished as runners-up in their respective qualifying groups. They are Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, Scotland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland. 

Teams who qualified automatically but failed to win their group obviously have a better record than those nations who relied upon the playoffs.

They even have a finalist among their number, though when you learn that it was Germany in 2008, it doesn’t feel like quite the upset that the raw fact suggests. 

Due to the multiple qualification formats seen over the years, most teams who fall under this banner took part in Euro 2008 and then the previous two editions. They had more success in the former, but they also had stronger teams and there were only 16 nations at the finals rather than 24 too.

Five of the eight nations in the quarter-finals in Austria and Switzerland 16 years ago were runners-up from qualification, and three of those sides made it to the semi-finals. 

As well as the German finalists, this group included Netherlands, Portugal and France in 2008, all of whom could have won their qualification groups and nobody would have been surprised.

Eight years later, Wales flew the runners-up flag highest with a semi-final appearance, while Iceland and Poland made it to the last eight. Similarly, Denmark made it to the semis last time out, with Czech Republic bowing out in the previous round. 

This means that across the two 24-team editions, a quarter of the qualifying runners-up have reached the quarter-finals. Pinnacle’s outright odds for Euro 2024 imply two of 10 will make it to that stage this summer, with Italy and Netherlands the teams in question. As Croatia are joint-ninth favorites, a third of these sides could easily make the last eight. 

HOW WELL DO QUALIFYING GROUP WINNERS PERFORM AT EUROS?

Our 10 qualification group winners this year are Albania, Belgium, Denmark, England, France, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Turkey. While the hopes of success are mixed for these teams, this set includes four of the five shortest priced countries in Pinnacle’s Euro 2024 Winner market.

History, if nothing else, shows why.

They also account for 13 of the 24 semi-finalists (54.2 percent) and 30 of 48 quarter-finalists (62.5 percent). As group winners from qualifying have provided 48.2 percent of the teams from Euro 2000 onwards, we can see that they have delivered an above average number of sides for each of the final three rounds. 

In 2020, only Poland from this set of teams fell at the Group Stage round, while Austria and Czech Republic did likewise in the edition prior. In other words, the majority of these such 10 countries in Germany should make the Round of 16 and one of them will likely be celebrating in Berlin on July 14.

HOW WELL DO EURO HOSTS PERFORM AT THE TOURNAMENT?

Germany is hosting the European Championships this summer and are third favorites with Pinnacle to win the tournament.

There was no host for Euro 2020. However, as England played all-but-one of their games at Wembley, they essentially were, and were a penalty shootout away from lifting the trophy. 

The eight hosts for the preceding five editions – as there were co-hosts on three occasions – provided a pair of runners-up and a further semi-finalist.

However, their standing within the continent at the time appears to have been far more relevant than the fact their matches were on home turf.

The three nations who made the later stages were all 14th-or-better for European teams in the FIFA World Rankings at the start of the tournament; the five who didn’t get past the group stage were 20th or worse.

History therefore suggests that Germany should be a good bet to reach the semi-finals at least.

SUMMARY

If we disregard host nations due to their advantage, the pattern is clear. Whether we look at the quarter-finals, the semi-finals or the final itself, the proportion of teams who reach those stages is greatest for qualification group winners, then runners-up with playoff qualifiers the least successful.

These findings would be the natural assumption, in truth, but when selecting your bets it never hurts to have some data to back up your suspicions, and they can help you determine if the odds are good value. 
 

Looking forward to Euro 2024? Enjoy everyday better odds by checking out the latest Euro 2024 odds on every match and group, outright markets, and more with Pinnacle.

 

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