World Cup

Trophy Winners #3 – Rugby Union (Men) 1984 to 2025

October 4, 2025 By Nigel Marriott

South Africa have won back to back Rugby Championships for the first time ever. That marks the last trophy to be won in the 2025 calendar year for men’s rugby worldwide and coincides with the start of the 2025/26 season in Europe. This makes it a propitious time to update my list of all trophy winners in men’s rugby worldwide since 1984,

Rugby World Cup #4 – Who will win in 2019? – Final

October 30, 2019 By Nigel Marriott

England will take on South Africa in the 2019 Rugby World Cup final this weekend and I am predicting a win for England by 1 to 6 points. In other words, it will be close and exciting!

Rugby World Cup #3 – Who will win in 2019? – Model Evaluation

October 30, 2019 By Nigel Marriott

After 43 matches with 37 correctly predicted, the stage is set for an epic final between England & South Africa to settle the 2019 Rugby World Cup (Men’s). Ahead of making a prediction for that match, I have examined my model in depth and in this post I explore whether or not the model needs to be adjusted.

Rugby World Cup #2 – Who will win in 2019? – Knockout Round

October 18, 2019 By Nigel Marriott

It’s the quarter finals tomorrow and it’s time for me to predict the outcomes using World Rugby’s rankings. Although I got 33 out of 37 matches right in the pool stages, the 4 errors are enough to change my prediction of who will win.

Rugby World Cup #1 – Who will win in 2019? – Pool Stage

September 19, 2019 By Nigel Marriott

Augustin Pichot, vice-president of World Rugby, may not like its ranking system but ahead of the 2019 Rugby World Cup (Men’s), I have been able to use rankings to correctly predict 80% of international matches since 2017. For the world cup that starts this week, I used a dynamic ranking model to predict all matches and it shows that 4 countries cannot be separated for the trophy so we are in for some very exciting matches!