RSSeNEWS to be determined...

As the World Cup got underway, statisticians and pundits were busy making forecasts and offering advice based on their analyses of the beautiful game.

On the basis of recent form, Salford University's Dr Ian McHale now believes Holland – not Spain as he previously predicted – have the best chance of winning the competition. McHale used ordered probit to place the Dutch odds at 12 per cent, putting them ahead of Spain and Brazil.

McHale puts England's chances at 6 per cent; he reckons the team will win its group, beat Serbia in the next round but lose to France in the quarter final. He concedes that match would be "very level" but notes "unfortunately even if they win that they meet Brazil or Holland."

To calculate each team's form, McHale used the results from almost 9,000 matches played since 2002 and factored in each teams' Fifa world ranking. Then he examined one million different scenarios to predict each team's most likely progression. McHale's model does not take account of injuries or other developemts that could impact prospects.

Economics professor Stefan Szymanski of Cass Business School is similarly pessimistic about England's chances. He told listeners to BBC Radio 4's Today programme that "statistically, England's chances aren't very good. They're actually a very good team when they play an individual match and they're quite likely to win each game they play.

"The problem is when you stack up the sequence of wins they have to construct to win a World Cup it becomes very unlikely. The chances of England winning are something of the order of 10 per cent, which is not bad compared with many teams, but it's really not very likely. I'm afraid it's the usual story; England will almost certainly get through the group stages then they fall at the quarters or the semis - probably on a penalty shoot out."

Prof Marcus du Sautoy, who plays for the English Writers football team, says there is "huge randomness" in the outcome of the contest, and that makes it almost impossible to predict the outcome. He puts the odds of making a correct prediction at three to the power of sixty four, which means "you've got more chance of winning the National Lottery".

On Radio 4's More or Less, Tim Harford asked Duncan Alexander of Opta what advice he would offer England manager Fabio Capello, based upon its analysis of players' form. Opta analyses matches, typically recording 1,500 separate actions in every game from a list of around 350 alternatives. Alexander said that based upon the data, Capello should field the relatively inexperienced goal keeper Joe Hart. Although Hart has never played for England in a competitive match he out-performed two more experienced candidates (David James and Robert Green) in the Premier League last season.

Confirming the widely held view about England's best player, Alexander said that Opta's data showed that Wayne Rooney had the best form in the Premier League last season. But "although he had a great club season, he didn't have a very good season for England," Alexander commented. "The season before last he scored 9 goals in 10 games for England; the season just gone he only scored once in 8 games; his conversion rate – the number of shots he takes that result in goals – has dropped from 29 per cent to 4 per cent."

And commenting on whether Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard can play together in mid-field, Alexander told Harford that "England actually perform best when only Gerrard plays … they won 77 per cent of games; when it's only Lampard it's only 45 per cent". He added: "that's no reason to drop him, but there can be quite pronounced statistical differences with different combinations."

• Are these experts right? Let us know your predictions - and how you arrived at them