With the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) a few days away, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has predicted the team to emerge champions at the end of the tournament.
24 nations will be competing for the coveted AFCON trophy in Ivory Coast, but according to statistics provider Opta’s AI who ran the numbers to find out which nation are most likely to emerge victorious, defending champions Senegal came out with the most probable outcome.
In a BBC Sport article produced in collaboration with Opta, the prediction model gives Senegal a 12.8% chances of winning the tournament, a higher likelihood than any other team.
Should the ‘Lions of Teranga’ manage to win the trophy, they would become the fourth country ever to do so and the first since Egypt won three in a row between 2006 and 2010.
Opta’s prediction model estimates the probability of each match outcome by using betting market odds and their own team rankings.
It then factors in the potential draw and the difficulty of each nation’s path to the final. Hosts Ivory Coast (12.1%) are statistically the second-most likely team to taste glory in this edition of Afcon, with Morocco (11.1%) third.
Algeria (9.7%) are the fourth-most likely winners, with Egypt fifth (8.5%).
Rounding off the top seven teams in Opta’s predictor model are three-time AFCON winners Nigeria (1980, 1994, and 2013) and five-time champions Cameroon (1984, 1988, 2000, 2002, and 2017). Nigeria has an 8.1% chance of lifting the trophy, and Cameroon has 7.5%.