Adrian Kavanagh's Blog

Adrian Kavanagh, 13th May 2016

In these past, I used this model to successfully predict the Azerbaijan win at the 2011 contest,  the Denmark win in 2013 and the Sweden win at the 2015 contest, while this same model correctly identified 17 of the 20 qualifiers from the 2015 semi finals (although it proved decidedly less effective in predicting the 2016 qualifiers). Now that we know the running order for the 2016 Eurovision Final I am going to use this to try and tease out who the likely winners will be of the 2015 contest will be. There are, however, a variety of factors (including the problems in terms of predicting the 2016 semi final qualifiers) that suggest that the 2016 Final model may not be as accurate as in previous years, but particularly the changes being made to the voting process that effectively mean that each country’s jury vote score and public vote/televote score will be treated as separate entities for this year’s contest – i.e. each country will award two separate scores – a jury vote score and a televote/public vote score. It is the latter of these two different scores/rankings (i.e. the televote score) that this model should be most effective in predicting.

With the numbers crunched, Russia, Australia, Ukraine and Sweden – both with relatively good positions in the contest running order, a tendency to do well in terms of “friends and neighbours” and “diaspora” voting and very high rankings in the bookies odds – stand on top of the pile. Other countries/finalists, such as Armenia, France and Italy, also figure strongly in relation to these factors, or some of these factors. But be wary!

• This model cannot take account of the impact of the actual performances on both Final nights (including the Jury Final on the Friday night and Public/Televised Final on the Saturday night).
• As the voting history statistics are based mainly on past televoting trends, the model cannot take account for the voting decisions of the highly influential professional juries, who have as much bearing on the Final result as the televotes have.
• The voting history statistics for Australia are quite limited and based on just one contest (2015 Final) – a contest that Australia finished 5th in, meaning that the Australia vote estimates could be somewhat over-estimated as regards this particular factor. However, this is offset by the fact that four of this year’s entrants (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia and Ukraine) did not participate in last year’s contest.

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Adrian Kavanagh, 8th April 2016 (Updated: 22nd April 2016)

As I used this model to successfully predict the Azerbaijan win at the 2011 contest,  Denmark’s win in 2013 and Sweden’s win in 2015,  I am going to use this to tease out who the likely qualifiers will be now that we know the running order for the two 2016 Eurovision semi-finals. Those of you who have read The Eurovision Handbook 2013 (as well as the 2014 edition of this – sadly low purchase levels of this notwithstanding…) will know that I used this same model to (sort of!) successfully predict most of the qualifiers for the 2013 and 2014 finals. This same model also succeeded in predicting most of the semi-final qualifiers in the 2015 contest.

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Adrian Kavanagh, 25th January 2016

In terms of working out who may win this year’s two Eurovision semi-finals/predicting which countries might qualify from these, various factors can be looked at, but the four most significant ones are:

• the song quality (which I use Eurovision betting odds as a means of trying to quantify this)
• past voting histories (involving the different countries – the semi-finalists themselves and the three Big 5/Host countries drawn to vote in these – that will be voting in the different semi-finals)
• position in the semi-final running order
• performance quality (both in the (public)  show itself and the previous night’s dress rehearsal/jury final, which is the contest that the Eurovision juries get to vote on).

As only a crystal ball can predict the quality and impact of the different acts’ Eurovision performances at this stage and as betting odds and draw/running order position details are not yet known, this analysis will just focus on past voting history as a means of determining which countries are likely to qualify for the 2016 Eurovision Final. (more…)