Yesterday’s 7-1 World Cup Semi-Final rout of Brazil by Germany will go down in the record books for many decades to come for a multitude of reasons. Sure, Brazil is the host nation and they’ve been picked by many, including Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog to win it all. But yesterday, the German national team proved all of them wrong with an impressive 7-0 display up until the 90th minute when Oscar scored the face-saving only goal for Brazil. Now that we know that World Cup Semi-Finals can have as many points scored as an American Football game, it comes as no surprise that such a game stirred up quite a ruckus on Twitter.

According to the BBC a record 35.6 million tweets were sent during the course of the 90 minutes of the game’s play. It also broke the record for the most tweets per minute with 580,601 tweets in a single minute. This happened when Germany scored their fifth goal on Brazil, obviously setting off a firestorm on Twitter. Any game that reaches a 5-0 result is pretty much considered a rout or much much worse. The previous tweets-per-minute record for a sporting event was set by another World Cup match, when Brazil played against Chile, which had 389,000 tweets per minute. Previous to that, the 2014 Superbowl held the record at 382,000 tweets per minute, which isn’t that much of a surprise but only stands to show the evermore increasing importance of Twitter.

In addition to setting off a firestorm of tweets that probably sent Twitter’s network engineers in a scramble to ensure there was enough bandwidth the game also took up 6 of the 10 top trending spots on Twitter. The #BrazilvsGermany hastag took the top spot while players like Miroslav Klose took the top spot for being the most tweeted during the game.

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Google’s Cloud Platform has been predicting the winners of the World Cup since the round of 16 and so far has been 11/12 after getting 8/8 correct in the round of 8. Google’s Cloud Platform combines Cloud Dataflow, BigQuery and Compute Engine in order to arrive at their final results.

According to their predictions, which have been almost perfect with the exception of the France v Germany game (I predicted Germany) with Germany beating France, defeating Google’s perfect record. In fact, Google gave France a 69% chance of winning that game, but the result was 1-0 with Germany defeating France.

So, then, why did Google get things wrong? Well, they claim that they got things wrong for a lack of data, not getting enough data points that could help them more accurately adjust the percentages of each team’s probability. Google’s predictions are based upon an inductive model that is derived from game-play data rather than a model based off of changes in betting behavior or certain pre-existing models. The FiveThirtyEight Blog has had a running World Cup Prediction table that uses a different model that is based upon ESPN’s SPI (soccer player index) and has some flaws including not accounting for player injuries and suspensions. They have, however, posted a blog that addresses these losses to the Brazilian team in the Semi Final and Final.

Google says they got the France v Germany wrong because in the first four games of the World Cup, France simply took more shots and had more shots on target than Germany. Additionally, their shots were from a location closer to the goal than Germany’s indicating a stronger likelihood that they would have such things happen against Germany as well.

Google also said that in their first four games, Germany allowed their opponents to take more dangerous shots. This made the possibility that France would be able to score against Germany a much higher probability. Germany also allowed their opponents to pass better in their third of the field, which is a major factor in many games’ final scores. And the statistics in the game continued in Google’s favor in the Germany v France game with the exception of the final score itself. France had 13 shots and 9 on target while Germany only had 8 and 6 on target, indicating that France had plenty more chances and merely squandered them (or was merely unlucky).

Even so, its interesting to see how even though we have all this data and all these great models, nothing can make up for good old human error (in this case, France’s inability to put the ball in the back of the net). Google also has some interesting predictions for the next round, The Semi Finals. They predict that Germany has a 59% chance of beating Brazil, and that does not take into account the loss of Neymar to a broken back. They’ve also lost Thiago Silva to a suspension due to collecting his second yellow in his last game, which Brazil is obviously appealing.

In terms of Netherlands vs Argentina, Google has Argentina winning with 61% odds in their favor, but I believe that does not take into account the loss of Angel Di Maria. But as Nate Silver stated in the FiveThirtyEight blog above, very few players outside of Lionel Messi and Ronaldo have anywhere near a significant enough impact on a team’s ultimate performance.

Overall, it will be interesting to see how accurate Google’s predictions will ultimately be and whether or not they can improve upon their record using their own cloud platform to do the work. Obviously, this is a promotional post by Google to promote how they can do so much vast data crunching with their platform and how it provides clear and accurate results (even though their model is mostly responsible for that).

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Well, it appears as though Luis Suarez’s infamous bite seen around the world has already been made into a game called Biteman with a few modifications to the popular Pacman game. The game is called Biteman and is designed to mock the fact that Luis Suarez bit Giorgio Chiellini during a completely unprovoked attack. If you didn’t see the bite, we’ve got a nice GIF image for you to see where he clearly bites his opponent. And this isn’t the first time Suarez has bitten an opponent while playing, in fact, this is the third time he’s done such a thing. Previously he’s bitten opponents while with Ajax and Manchester City clubs.

The ESPN guys break down all of his instances of biting other players and as of right now, Suarez stands to get anywhere between a 2 game and a 2 year suspension, with the latter seeming far more reasonable considering that this is his third offense and soccer is not a blood sport where people bite each other. Heck, people don’t bite each other in UFC and that’s the most violent sport we televise today.

The game itself is quite addicting, much like the original Pacman, except they’ve swapped out ghosts for refs and Pacman for Suarez. You go around the map eating/biting mini Chiellinis and get points for doing so and then once you bite a pair of glasses the refs are blind and slow and you can eat them. Clearly, this is a commentary on the situation and the state of the game and someone thought it would be funny to mock Suarez and his complete and utter desire to bite the hell out of his opponents.

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