>>63147327Most of it's just luck tbh, I used to do some work as a professional gambler as a small part of a larger business. I came from a statistics background, but my performance on the tables was mediocre (monetary wise; in terms of my moves I was in the top 3% of players), so the money holders had me try my hand at calculating sports odds.
I took the elo formula from chess and modelled each game as a tournament where each goal was the equivalent of a checkmate, thus giving more resolution than brute wins or losses. As it turns out, there is so much variance in soccer, so much luck is involved, that you have to bet on millions of games to turn a profit.
A given team winning the world cup is skilled for sure, but more than skilled they are lucky. It may well be the case that England have had several world cup winning squads, the coin flips simply didn't fall in their favour.
