Every year, when watching the Eurovision Song Contest, we can hear our national commentators talking about favourite countries/songs to win the competition. These favourites have been identified by bookmakers and different betting houses.
In the last ten years, bookmakers have predicted 9 of the 10 winners. In the last month, a clear top 5 emerged:
Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Sweden, Russia
The biggest news of the day has been the running order of the semi-finals and its great impact on the betting odds. It comes as no surprise that singing first is not well appreciated and most delegations wish they would sing towards the last positions of the running order so that their song is still in people’s mind. Only three contestants in Eurovision history have won the contest singing in first place and even worse; singing in second place has never seen any winners but on the contrary has seen the biggest number of last place finishes.
With todays’ announcement there’s been some change in the countries more likely to win. Indeed, according to oddschecker.com, Denmark singing in 5th place in the first semi-final is still the ultimate strong favourite ahead of Norway who will perform 13th in the second semi-final. The highest climber is Ukraine who integrated the top 5 in 3rd place now ahead of the Netherlands who will sing respectively 7th and 8th in the first semi-final. Hence the current top 5 countries according to oddcheckers.com are :
1. Denmark
2. Norway
3. Ukraine
4. The Netherlands
5. Sweden
In terms of most popular bets, Denmark leads as well with slightly less than 20% of bets, ahead of the Netherlands with around 11%, Ukraine approx 9%, Norway approx 6% and Russia approx 6%.
We shall remind our readers that this is just an indication and as we have seen in 2011 (France was the strong favourite with Amaury Vassili and his song Sognu but he finished 15th), this is not an exact science.
Cover photo credit: Michael Sondergaard (DR)
