Who Could Win?

The Eurovision Song Contest is just around the corner once again and now all songs are out we are in somewhat of a peculiar situation.

This year Eurovision has no *clear* favorite, this is an unusual situation for the competition in recent years once all songs have been released the fans and bookmakers usually have managed to come to a conclusion on which song has the best chance to win. The last time there was a close battle between two countries was back in 2021 when Italy and France traded the top spot in the odds for a while but even then those two countries were pretty far ahead of the overs for most of the season, this year there is not a single song taking a commanding lead among the bookmakers or the fans.

At present, Croatia is the bookmaker’s favourite to win yet they are not confident enough in the song to give it a substantial lead over any of the competition. If we use Eurovisionworld’s “winners chance” (which is not reliable but is good for visualizing the situation) we see that despite being the favorite Croatia is only given a 17% chance of winning or an 83% chance of not winning. To put that into perspective both Sweden last year and Ukraine in 2022 were over 50% at this stage in the season.

The bookmaker’s early betting suggests that they are thinking that Croatia will get a similar televote score to Finland last year, however, the enthusiasm within the fandom is significantly less than last year and fans seem to have coerced around other songs. Interestingly, the bookmakers are giving high odds on songs generally believed to do better in the televote than the jury vote this is despite no changes in the system that saw the jury help Loreen sweep victory next year – but this is a sensible approach as there is nothing in this years lineup that is going to be able to unite the jury vote like last year. Even the “jury bait” songs are not expected to sweep anywhere near as many of the points as Loreen did.

So why is this year so open? It’s an interesting question many have pondered that this year’s quality is higher than others but personally, I disagree. While the worst songs (personal opinion) in this year’s lineup are better than the worst songs from some preceding year I think it is also true to say that the best songs in this year’s lineup are not as good as the best songs from previous years’ lineups. Personally, I believe that the field spread being so small this year is more a result of the quality of the best songs in the lineup decreasing this year as opposed to the overall quality being higher this year.

Either way, this is set to be an incredibly exciting year and with no one seemingly able to claim to be the clear winner it makes this years’ competition more exciting and more nervewracking than ever before for the fans and artists alike.

Image courtesy of EBU