England fans, save your money – my dog has predicted World Cup misery

There’s a lot to admire, clearly, about the German economist Joachim Klement. As the BBC reported last week, his whole-tournament modelling has enabled him to predict the winners of the last three World Cups.

But he isn’t an octopus, is he? He isn’t a loggerhead turtle operating out of a sanctuary in Praio do Forte in Brazil. He isn’t even my dog Ruby, whose performance as a psychic terrier for one of the grubbier national prints during Russia 2018 is still talked about in reverent tones whenever the subject of animals predicting the results of football matches comes up.

And that’s what we’re typically looking for in the final fortnight leading up to a World Cup, isn’t it? Psychic wildlife. Not economists, but, say, a spider crab from a provincial aquarium with a strong hunch regarding Brazil this time.

People say this all started with Paul the Octopus from the Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, with his tank-based speculations on Euro 2008 and South Africa 2010. But by then Nelly, the unimaginatively named elephant from Serengeti Park in Hodengagen, was already on the way to racking up 30 correct predictions across the 2010 World Cup and the 2012 Euros, as well as the 2013 Champions League final. 

Then Achilles, a hearing-impaired cat working out of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, got involved, and so did a British micropig called Marcus who had some form after calling Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton and the Brexit vote. And then in 2022, Camilla the mystic camel from Melton Mowbray … but there are too many things wrong with that sentence already for me to finish it.

The point is, whether it’s Mani the parakeet in Singapore, or Madame Shiva the Swiss guinea pig, or whether it’s Drayton Manor Theme Park getting its ‘mystic meerkats’ on the case, animal seers descend on World Cups like seagulls on a trawler.

Which is why I was minded this week to get Ruby off the sofa, where she’s not really meant to be anyway. It seemed to make sense. The insightful Irish Wheaten was just a pup when she picked Croatia to beat strongly fancied Argentina in the 2018 group phase. What feats of foresight might we see from her now, as a maturer student of the game with eight more years of sleeping in front of televised football matches to bring to the kibble?

So I set it up in the kitchen: a bowl representing England, a bowl for (respectively) their Group L opponents, Ghana, Croatia and Panama, and a third bowl for the draw. Then I let the dog in, three times over. Result? Ruby had England drawing with Croatia and Panama and losing to Ghana.

I pulled the plug after that because this didn’t really seem to be going anywhere. My dog doesn’t think England are going to do particularly well. But that’s not really a story, is it? Neither does anyone who saw the recent friendlies and/or Thomas Tuchel’s squad selection. You don’t need my dog to tell you that.

Mostly, though, the project itself had felt distinctly, even embarrassingly, old-fashioned. It was painfully clear that the binary winner/loser calls offered by the standard psychic animal model simply don’t align any more with the way the modern world speculates about football – the world of in-play betting, live odds, and fast-twitch accumulators.

For example, my favourite gambling story from recent times involves a friend who, in the 88th minute of the Tyne-Wear derby last March, with the game tied, backed Sunderland’s Brian Brobbey both to score and get yellow-carded in the narrow window that remained – on the canny grounds that if Brobbey did score and sink Newcastle in those emotionally heightened circumstances, his shirt would be coming off, ensuring the referee’s sanction. Brobbey did indeed score, and did indeed remove his shirt, and a £1 stake duly yielded £140. No disrespect, but you just don’t get steers like that from penguins, nor even (I’ll admit) from Ruby.

Nevertheless, tradition is tradition. Joachim Klement says the Netherlands are going to win the tournament and England are going out to Portugal in the semi-finals. But it’s a World Cup, so don’t believe it until you hear it from some museum’s cat.

Photograph by Giles Smith