The Eurovision final hasn’t happened yet, but all eyes are already on the main favourite, Swede Loreen. His song “Tattoo” has a 50% chance of winning according to odds from a dozen bookies.
The next big contender is Finn Käärijä, who bettors give a 21% chance. Ukraine, defending the title won in Italy last May, is the third favorite with 6%. The Spaniard Blanca Paloma, who will compete with the song Eaea, belongs to the third group with 3%.
In the graphic below, you can check the options of all participants in the finals and listen to each song on Spotify by clicking the button.
The bets usually predict the Eurovision Song Contest well. For the last three years they have guessed the ultimate winner of the competition and since 2016 they have always named the winner and runner-up among their three favorites. With this data, Spain’s Blanca Paloma doesn’t have many options, although last year Chanel and her SloMo easily beat the predictions that gave her fifth place and took third place.
If we look at the popularity of the finalists on Spotify, the Swede also has an advantage, closely followed by two new actors: Norwegian Alessandra with “Queen of Kings” and Italian Marco Mengoni with “Due vite”.
The least acoustic release of the decade
There will be fewer guitar and piano chords in the songs for this Eurovision final, and not just for the favourites. Spotify metrics show the gala will be the most electronic of the decade, as well as one of the most energetic.
Average by Edition Songs 2023
Still, there are clear differences between the two best-odds suggestions: both are energetic, Tattoo but sadder and less danceable, while Käärijä’s Cha Cha Cha is more positive and a bit more acoustic.
The other finalists follow a similar path. Only Armenian and Estonian songs are unmarked. The latter will perform with piano accompaniment only, while the Armenian representative plays both extremes: although she spends half of her performance in a similar manner, sitting on the floor, she ends with a more plural accompaniment.
Songs in English, unstoppable. Mixtures, not so profitable
With the dominance of electronics and Norse origins, the similarity between cha cha cha and tattoo ends. Loreen’s proposal is written entirely in English, while Käärijä will rap on stage in Finnish.
If the competition’s history is to be believed, Sweden has the advantage: two out of five wins were sung in Shakespeare’s language, which has been the dominant language since 1999, when each contestant was allowed to choose the language of their song. This dominance has been threatened since 2017 when Salvador Sobral won by singing his Amor pelos dois in Portuguese. The last two winners, Italy and Ukraine, also participated in their language.
On Saturday, only 9 of the 26 songs will be played entirely in other languages. One of them will be Spanish.
There will also be mixed proposals such as Heart of Steel, with which the Tvorchi duo will represent Ukraine. Only this country can boast of having made profitable the recurring mixtures of English and other languages: they are the only two victories that the 83 songs of this type could achieve in the history of the festival. Cocktails that did not contain English (17) have never won.
Spain didn’t fare too bad either: Chanel climbed to third place last year with the song SloMo and its bilingual chorus: Take a Video, watch it slow mo, mo, mo…
Sweden strokes Ireland’s record
In 1996, Ireland became the country with the most wins in the Eurovision Song Contest. Seven Victories No One Could Match… Until now? If the bets come true, Sweden will also claim their seventh win at the festival and Ireland, eliminated in the first semi-final, will be unable to do anything about it.
The other favorites don’t have that much of an advantage. Norway has had three victories and Finland only had a taste of success in 2006 when Lordi filled the stage with orcs. In fact, both countries are more conspicuous for their failures: they are among the candidates who won the last places at the festival.
In the graph you can see all the winners as well as those who remained in each position. The UK has an unbeatable record of 16 editions and is on the verge of success with a second place finish. France (5) and Spain (4) follow at a great distance.
What to do with the valuable twelve points? Not too far
Increasingly spectacular performances and floor-to-ceiling stages have not yet eclipsed the magic of scoring and the opportunity it affords viewers to blame any country for voting out its neighbors.
The distribution by region from 1975 to 2022 shows that the juries don’t usually look far when awarding their coveted twelve points. In this context, it is to be expected that even the most disadvantaged candidates will benefit from one of the festival’s certainties: the four cardinal points favor on most occasions.
Distribution of the highest scores. Origin and destination of the 12 points awarded by the jury of each region from 1975 to 2022
Origin from
the 12 points
Goal
from
the 12 points
Israel and Australia are excluded.
Source: Datagraver.com and own elaboration.
The twelve south points stay south half the time, and the same goes for the north. Both regions also agree with their western neighbors in their reluctance to choose the east, which in no case gets more than 15% of the maximum scores.
These preferences are similar to televoting. But the balance sheet could change this year. In Saturday’s final, the audience’s voice will not only come from the countries that have the right to participate in the festival. This year votes from the rest of the world will be accepted.
The bane of acting at the beginning of the gala
There are studies that suggest that juries, especially lay judges, tend to evaluate those who perform better at the end of the competition. The data of the points awarded by the expert jury and the public via televoting since 2009, when this double path came into play, shows the effort involved in acting at the beginning.
In the last 13 editions, the finalists, ranging between first and sixth place, rarely managed to win more than 8% of the votes. If the curse is still in effect, Austria, Portugal, Switzerland, Poland and Serbia will be affected this year.
From fifth place, the ratings are more varied: those who act later achieve higher percentages, but also remain below 8%. The record is held by the Ukrainian Kalush Orchestra, which scored 19% of the points last year and came in twelfth place.
Winners up to 40, Winners up to 50
If Loreen wins at Liverpool she will be an unusual winner. More than when he first competed in 2011, at the age of 27. The average age of the winners is 24, a far cry from the Swede’s current 39, which would become the second-oldest winner of the competition after Linda Martin, who represented Ireland in 1992.
At the opposite extreme is Belgian Sandra Kim, who stunned the jury and caused controversy in 1986 when it was revealed that she wasn’t 15, as her song said, but 13.
This age limit does not seem to be the same for the male candidates: the average of the winners is 30 years. What’s more, the elders are older too: George Olsen and Dave Benton were already half a century old when they represented Denmark and Estonia respectively.
Israel and Australia are excluded.
Source: Datagraver.com and own elaboration.
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