• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, June 10, 2016

I was talking with a company the other day called Blue Yonder, that usually uses Big Data to tell stores what stocks they should be holding or how much they should produce, given variables such as customer demand, the weather and likely footfall over the next few days. If I told you they have helped a fast-food chain cut down on waste and allowed a well-known sushi chain to reduce waste by 10%, you get the idea.

The company's algorithm has been developed by its founder, a former CERN scientist, and has so far been used for commercial purposes. However, when tasked with the most important question of the day, it readily swung into action to predict...  who will win Euro 2016.

Analysing every international game played in the last hundred years, and giving weighting to more recent encounters, the tech predicted the likelihood of each team winning its group, or qualifying for the next rounds in second place. It then went on to give the possibilities of each team progressing from the quarter finals to the semis and then the final. 

So which team and supporting sponsor will be in seventh heaven and who's going home early with their tail between their legs? Well,  it turns out that it's good news for official sponsor, La Poste and Nike, as France has a near one in three chance of winning. That's double the probability of winning allotted to Spain and England, and makes France three times more likely to lift the cup than Germany.

It's great news for Nike, which is not an official sponsor of course. But is likely to be on the winning shirt that should -- if the algorithm is right -- triumph over Spain, whose shirt bears the emblem of the tournament's official sponsor, Adidas. In third and fourth spot should be England, in Nike shirts, and Germany in Adidas (of course).

So that's the winners settled. How do the home countries do? Sorry, readers from Wales and Northern Ireland -- the software says you guys don't make it out of the open group. In fact, it says you both come at the bottom of your groups.

As for England, it's the same old story. We are picked out to win our group and sail through the round featuring the last 16 qualifiers but then lose in lose in the quarter finals or semifinals -- again! Only not against Italy this time, as in Euro 2012. For the record, the algorithm has picked out Italy as the underachievers struggling to get out of their group and unlikely to go any further if they do.

So it's just a bit of Friday fun on the day the tournament begins -- but trust me, if Blue Yonder get it right, they can expect a few more people knocking on their door. Yahoo's scientists have used Big Data to predict the same big four of France, Spain, Germany and England being the most likely to win but its number crunches reckon Germany will beat Spain in the final.

If you want some advice on a decent long shot from a soccer fan, Belgium would be my pick for a proverbial dark horse, but that's got nothing to do with Big Data, just gut feel.