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History of the predictor game

This is a brief and subjective and yet incomplete history of this predictor game taken from the depth of the brain of its inventor. "One day, baby, we'll be old and think of all the stories that we could have told..."

World Cup 1990: First predictor game, we only predicted the first round. Except me, there was my best friend from school who participated.
GDR had not qualified at the end. Because we lost against Austria. The West Germans won, which didn't cause big feelings. First Panini Stickers, „Un’estate italiana“, commercials on East German TV (the Ford Fiesta was praised as beautiful family car)

World Cup 1994: Predictor game in my final class at school, 9 participants. Nicely printed out and filled out by hand. We predicted everything until the final. The tournament itself: really disappointing, Germany losing the quarter final against Bulgaria and all the games in the middle of the night.

EURO 1996: 3 participants, I participated twice myself. I don't remember anything from the predictor game, other things might have been more important at the time. What I remember about football: the spectacular overtime of Germany against England in the semi final and - of course - the only golden goal so far deciding the final...

World Cup 1998: The first international predictor game while I was an intern in Paris. I sent out all the papers per snail mail, and everything got back on time. (Even though I got my first university email address a short time before leaving for France). 25 participants.
Michel Jaud predicts the final France - Bresil and the correct result and he wins the entire predictor game - a true legend. The world cup: from the German perspective it was a disaster with the "pensioneer team". I was at Place Stalingrad to watch them lose the quarter-final against Croatia. The next day everybody from work who knew I was German came up to me to make some joke. But I also remember nice invitations to watch the matches of the French team together at different colleagues homes, nice public festivities in Saint-Denis and on the Champs Elysees. Ordering tickets worked on the telephone only and I got two tickets for France - Saudi-Arabia in the amazing Stade de France (2nd row from top or so). Stéphane took me to Montpellier to watch Italy – Cameroun, returning on TGV seated over night and immediately back to work afterwards - luckily I was an intern only.

Euro 2000: First real predictor game for the Euro. But no souvenirs remain. France beating Italy in a spectacular way, we watched this on a 30 cm TV as students, the TV standing on the window bench on the ground floor, the people sitting outside.

World Cup 2002: We played a theatre play before some of the matches in Japan with texts about football. Michael Ballack and Oliver Kahn at the start of their careers. The predictor game fully automated in Excel by my friend Carsten with 43 participants. Everybody sending its file by mail and then it is combined in the huge files „Auswertung.xls“ and "Auswertung Auswertung.xls“, where the statistics are computed.

Euro 2004: not a single memory, probably because Germany played so badly.

World Cup 2006 (49 Participants): the big party in Germany. A new flat screen is being inaugurated during the opening match Costa Rica-Deutschland, my elder son (4 years old) is crying, because my friend Ralf is shouting out so loud with every goal - and there were many... After the final I had to give a presentation together with my former italian colleague Andrea who put the World Cup on the Power Point slide (no, the presentation was not about football, but about Railway optimization...)
The prediction is entered on a JavaScript-page where a code is being generated, which had to be sent per email. I collected these codes and copied them into a „results.html“ file. The results needed to be entered individually and were stored as cookies. This was the first predictor game in english as I had almost forgotten all of my french during my time in the Netherlands...

Euro 2008 (65 participants) I only remember Ballacks amazing free kick against Austria

World Cup 2010 (107 participants) the website was changed so that the results were entered on a web page centrally. By any participant. This was a bit chaotic. And a good lesson to have this done by selected users only in all the games thereafter. Cool football tournament of the German team introducing Thomas Müller.

Euro 2012: using a database to save the predictions and results for the first time, evaluation is still done through JavaScript, so overall it is still possible to see the results offline.

World Cup 2014: Last time on the server of the technical university. Germany beating brasil 7-1 and becoming world champion.

Euro 2016: new competition mode (24 teams, 3 best third places qualify for final round) require radical change of code. All in PHP now and object-oriented, no one cares that the offline capability has disappeared. The game is hosted for the first time on the server of CDV association. Almost 100 EUR are collected to support building of a school in a rural Ghanaian region.

World Cup 2018: the code from the Euro now had to be adapted to the World Cup rules again. In the short time between my marriage and the start of the tournament. The World Champion left the stage as early as possible.

Euro 2020 in 2021 (106 participants): postponed by the Covid pandemic to 2021. Significant improvements in the code concerning translations and in the evaluation part including statistics per game. For the Football, it was for me the first time liking the way Italy was playing. It was the end of Jogi Löws era as head coach of the German team after some matches where I got a few additional gray hair, e.g. against Hungary. I have to make up a new password next time.