Prediction Model for the Africa Cup of Nations 2019 via Nested Poisson Regression

This article is devoted to the forecast of the Africa Cup of Nations 2019 football tournament. It is based on a Poisson regression model that includes the Elo points of the participating teams as covariates and incorporates differences of team-specific skills. The proposed model allows predictions in terms of probabilities in order to quantify the chances for each team to reach a certain stage of the tournament. Monte Carlo simulations are used to estimate the outcome of each single match of the tournament and hence to simulate the whole tournament itself. The model is fitted on all football games on neutral ground of the participating teams since 2010.