On May 10, 1970, The Observer newspaper came out with this headline on the front page: “Can England Do It Again? A computer predicts the team that will win the World Cup ”. Let’s talk about football, and about the world cup in Mexico. The idea of asking how it would end had been the Observer’s own, starting from the consideration that a computer had sent a man to the moon in 1969, and therefore could well answer a question like: who will win the World Cup? England had won the 1966 World Cup and were obviously favorites. The computer predicted, and it was rather obvious, a final with Pele’s Brazil, won by the English 3 to 2 after extra time. It made sense, but as is well known it did not go like this: West Germany in the quarterfinals surprisingly eliminated England; then he lost to us in the famous semi-final of 4 to 3; and we lost rather hard in the final against Brazil, 4 to 1.
Therefore, the forecast is wrong but historical in its own way, because it was the first of a long series of attempts to predict sports results with a computer. In this case, the project was led by sports journalist David Hunn who collected all the information on the sixteen participating teams and transferred it to the computer, an Elliot 803. This was a British computer quite in vogue in the 1960s: there were some just over 200 in circulation and one of these was used by the Observer. Beside the sports reporter was a small team of teenagers from Dulwich College who had gained some notoriety as mathematical talents for hitting the winner of the 1969 Grand National, one of the UK’s premier horse races.
More than half a century has passed since that wrong prediction, computers are getting more and more powerful and sophisticated, but no one has been able to find a way to guess the results of a sports competition, fortunately. Forecasts help orient but life remains unpredictable.