Eurovision Winning

Eurovision is coming up soon, so it's been on my mind. I've been curious for awhile which countries have been the most successful and which have been the least successful. Of course, one could just look at number of wins, but that is skewed because countries have competed for a different number of years and there was less competition prior to 1992. Therefore, I decided to look at the predicted number of wins a country should have based on how many times it competed and the likelihood of winning each years competition. The graph below shows the results.

Click to enlarge

The graph shows the difference in actual wins versus predicted wins. So, for example, based on the number of times Portugal has competed, it should have won 2.3 times by now, but it has not, so its score is -2.3. Denmark is the closest to where it should be, having won twice against a prediction of 1.99 wins. At the other end, Ireland's predicted wins are 2.3, the same as Portugal, but has actually won 7 times. Germany has the highest predicted wins of 3.1, having competed all but once.

The next three worse scores after Portugal are Belgium, Finland, and Austria. This is interesting because these are all countries that have won before, but have been in the competition for a very long time. Finland would be in last place if they hadn't won with Lordi in 2006. The second best score goes to Luxembourg which quit participating in 1993, just as the number of participants was increasing. In fact, with the exception of Sweden, the top 7 scores belong to countries which haven't won any of the last 14 competitions. Of course, 3 of those 7 won during the infamous 1969 contest when four countries tied and there was no tie-breaking rule.

While it would be nice to see Portugal bring its score up, they have decided not to compete this year due to financial reasons. So here's hoping that Belgium wins this year.