BLUNDERS were aplenty during the 2018 Fifa World Cup. Remember how Argentina's goalie Willy Caballero kicked the ball directly to Croatian player Ante Rebic who then scored? How about that marketing campaign by Burger King Russia that offered Russian women millions in roubles and lifetime Whoppers if they got impregnated by a World Cup footballer?

Of course, not to be forgotten is how elite banks wrongly predicted the World Cup winner using data. Goldman Sachs forecasted that Brazil would beat Germany 2-1 in the finals, while UBS tipped Germany as the most likely champion with a 24 per cent chance of winning, followed by Brazil and Spain. Both banks weren't even close!

What does this say about data? Goldman Sachs had reportedly crunched countless data points about teams and individual players into four machine learning models and picked the most likely results out of a million simulations. UBS had scored each team based on an "objective skill-level measurement" that accesses all its matches and even any home nation advantage.