Adrian Kavanagh, 8th May 2017
I have used this model to successfully predict the Azerbaijan win at the 2011 contest, Denmark’s win in 2013 and Sweden’s win in 2015, as well as to predict that Russia would win the televote at the 2016 contest (but not the jury vote, or the overall prize). I am going to use this to tease out who the likely qualifiers will be from this week’s two 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. It was not as successful last year, however; in part because of the growing clout/impact of the jury vote. But also because an unusual number of counties that have traditionally fared poorly at the contest since the introduction of televoting (e.g. Bulgaria, Belgium, Austria and The Netherlands) did especially well at last year’s contest.
In terms of working out who may win this year’s two Eurovision semi-finals/predicting which countries might qualify from these (and hopefully making a few bob in the process) various factors can be looked at, but the three most significant ones are: (more…)