Eat Clean, Train Hard and Do The Math

Following our look at Italy's touted path to victory it's more than time for me to get off poor Angelina's case this year and take a glance at the runners that appear (overly?) reliant on the televote. That would mainly be current 2nd favourite and escbetting prediction Croatia and the ever shortening Netherlands. Ukraine may also be appropriate here and can be read as Croatia too should you wish - I have fairly similar ranges for both. There is a scenario within which Israel also top the televote or enter the discussion to do so with these maths also being applicable to them should that come to pass.

So let's lay out the question for today;

How low can you place with the juries and still win?

To answer this we need some examples and those would best be Israel 2018 and Italy 2021 having won with a jury 3rd and 4th place respectively. 2018 may present the best example as this was a year where the rest of the jury top 4 struggled massively on the televote, something that may also be on the cards this time around. Indeed, I have compared Mustii to Cesar Sampson whilst others have compared Sweden that year to, er, Sweden this year. Not only was 'Toy' able to win, but win comfortably by 93 points. Maneskin had a less comfortable result with just a 25 point lead, suffering from greater TV/J consensus amongst the top entries- something that feels lacking for this year (so far).

So, there's a bit of an answer there already - come 3rd and you are still very much in the game, 4th and you are pushing your luck a little but there is precedence. Ukraine 2022 managed the victory from here with a massive asterisk, whilst Finland last year of course did not.

Took to the next logical step in the argument, no televote winner to have finished lower than 4th with the juries have ever won:

Italy 2015 J6th Overall 2nd (under current voting)

Russia 2016 J5th Overall 3rd

Norway 2019 J17th Overall 6th

So that's that then, 3rd you're good, 4th you might be, any lower and you are hopeless. Well, not quite. This is an escbetting math article so we must complicate everything again and bring out the abacus.

See, just because Russia 2016 or Finland 2023 didn't win that year doesn't mean it couldn't have, or indeed wouldn't have this year. In fact, what 3 of those four unlucky televote favs have in common is being up against huge jury favourites, something that is not a given this year. It is too simple to say take Loreen and Mans out and Kaarijaa and Il Volo would have won as we can't guarantee where those points would have gone but it is also too simplistic to to ignore them altogether as useful examples.

To get some solid figures to work with we'll be taking every televote winner in the 50/50 era (except 2013 - poor data and 2022 - Ukraine asterisk) and see what sort of points they can expect. Over those 12 editions since 2009 the televote winner has received on average 8.24 pts per voting country (5.23 low, 10.16 high)

I can also tell you with the full figures in front of me that 5.23 and indeed the second lowest of 6.39 are pretty big outliers and came in my opinion in standout weak years (2011 and 2010) which leads me to another conclusion: the winners points aren't really boosted or hindered by the competition, which may be very relevant this year. For all the talk of televote competition and whilst it’s a logical conclusion to come to, there’s simply not much evidence to back this up and instead there’s more canibalism of ‘weaker’ entries points rather than direct competitors. For this year, that may mean that Baby Lasagna and Joost can co-exist and we will instead see the likes of Estonia or geographic rivals - Serbia/Slovenia or Belgium/Luxembourg suffer.

Anyway, this average would put our televote winner on for around 305 points this year. The lack of consensus vs snowballing effect and those two low and older 'anomalies' in our dataset makes me feel this is a realistic enough number to work with.

Now for this next part, we will examine how often that average score of 8.24 from the public *could* get you the win from each jury position from those same 12 editions. The results are as follows:

1. 100%

2. 92%

3. 75%

4. 58%

5. 50%

6. 42%

7. 17%

8-12th. 10~%

13th or lower. 1~%

For those interested, the year by year breakdown of where I believe you would need to have been with the juries is below:

Now, this is not an exact science because of an uncertain vote removal effect in some of the backwards math being done and the fact there is correlation between jury and televote tastes to some degree. It's important to stress also those numbers listed are not the chance of the televote 1st winning rather the likelihood of them being in the race at all and in with a mathematical chance. These numbers also tie in with the general 150pt cutoff. If you are that far behind the jury winner something will beat you.

What to do with these numbers comes back around to your opinions on the year; mainly whether there is a 300+ jury song but also whether either Joost, Baby Lasagna, Alyona Alyona and Jerry or any other potential televote winner are stronger than average. Personally, I would say no to both so these numbers are a pretty solid guide.

Conclusions

“I think the evidence of the last few years is however it's essential to be open minded on what a televote winner could achieve”. What was wrote back in the Croatia review is still at the front of my mind and I do feel the main takeaway is that it is very much possible for an entry as low as 6th-7th with the juries to win in a year such as this with no certain 500 pt entry and the fact that we have yet to see something similar to this is a quirk more than anything. There are very realistic breakdowns in which something even lower would have a chance’ Put a Kaarijaa or Maneskin in 2011's field for example and they're winning even if the juries put them midtable. More relevantly, drop Netta down to 7th in 2018 and she's still taking the trophy. I believe this year also fulfils the criteria for a lower top 10 jury entry to win because I struggle to see a 200+ televote score for any of those current presumed jury favourites right now.

How Croatia, The Netherlands, Ukraine (and Israel or perhaps something like 8th favourite Greece) interplay between each other as a trident or more of televote reliant entries is something the stats can’t quantify for us, whilst the debate as to which of those is the outright favourite for the televote will probably not be sorted until the running order for the final at the earliest. Will consensus arrive seeing something like Switzerland or Italy a televote contender, or are we heading for a new winning split- if it’s the latter, I would rather be on board with the televote. #JuriesExist is still relevant, but will not be the deciding factor of the year, as it was throughout 2023.