In a slightly unique digital perspective of the 2016 European Championships, Yahoo researchers have teamed up with Tumblr and Opta to determine the winner of the competition.

Starting by analysing a wealth of Opta data on Yahoo Sport, the researchers have crawled through the last four years of match data of each team competing at the EUROs which kick off Friday, with the key data points being the averages of goals scored by them and against them.

With using the law of averages being all well and good to determine how that country performs, Yahoo then assigned values of strength to each team with the values being calculate according to each match-up and provided a representative game score.

If you thought that sounded scientific, it’s nothing compared to what the researchers did next. Using a complex form of analysis called the Poisson regression model and assigning five variables for each team, the researchers estimated the number of goals each team would score against each other.

The five variables included;

1. The average number of goals a participating team’s opponent scored against them in the previous four years.
2. How many times a participating team was mentioned in EURO 2016-related Tumblr posts.
3. How many times on average a given participating team’s player was mentioned in EURO 2016-related Tumblr posts.
4. The standard deviation.
5. The average number of goals a participating team scored in the previous four years.

After this, they determined that Germany would win the final with a 1-0 victory over Spain (see below)

Going one better, they’ve also identified the most popular team across Tumblr in the months leading up to the tournament by analysing how many mentions each one received.

Sorting through more than 20 billion posts added to over 24 million Tumblr blogs from January 1st through May 31st of this year, popular hashtags such as #football, #soccer, #BongDa, #Euro2016 and #UEFA were used to filter through the posts and find the relevant content.

They were then left with 1.8 million relevant posts which they then scanned for mentions of countries and players. Evidently, it is Portugal that is the most popular. See for yourself below.

To read the full report, click here