England’s football fans have spoken! World Cup College has harnessed and aggregated the thoughts of its readers to yield a democratically selected England team. As part of our group-mind team selector experiment, a massive 12 people picked their favoured England team to play Egypt this evening! The selections have been totalled and the group-mind team selection features in the graphic.
The first stage of the calculation was to establish the formation. 4-4-2 was the most popular core formation and under this core formation the standard 4-4-2 was also favoured. This is demonstrated in the table below the article (3-5-2 was also an option but was not chosen).
Players were then allocated to the team according to the number of times that they were selected for a particular position. (This process was explained in the previous article.)
No player selection was wasted. If you went for 4-3-3 (which includes wingers) a percentage of the selection for the winger transferred to both wide-midfield and centre-forward. For example, if you picked Stewart Downing at left-wing, 50% of this vote was transferred to left-midfield – and this helped him to pip Steven Gerrard into the side. Gerrard was a victim of his versatility: whilst he was picked in 10 of the 12 entries, there was no consensus with regard to where he should be stationed.
The actual team playing for England tonight will ultimately have been selected by one person – Fabio Capello. The team above was picked by 12 people and is therefore 12 times better!
A big thank you to those who participated!
