Predictions on baseball teams probably fall through when a star player is injured.
Neymar wouldn't have marked Muller for the first goal. Nor would he have been at the back to clean up the second fuck up, and the many fuck ups thereafter.
Thiago Silva is an excellent defender who organizes his defense to ensure proper defensive shape. In his absence, David Luiz was in charge of the same, and he isn't a particularly great defender to begin with (decent attacker, sure, but not a good defender).
Further, football resists statistical analysis, unlike most American sports, because momentum plays a HUGE part. Upsets are a common phenomenon in football. Small teams beat the big fish ALL the time.
Which is exactly why their current models failed. The need to be flexible.
Lots of people lost money. Maybe it was done on purpose? The models I mean. Cause I bet someone made a fortune. Someone short-selling the game?
PS: Or maybe Neymar's injury was "managed". Humm.. a nice juicy conspiracy theory. Stranger things have happened in the game before.
The considerable amount of collusion required across fifa, the teams and players, multiple publishing industries, organizations, countries and cultures to have sports betting and publications like fivethirtyeight make shit up (to the point that they created a very detailed scoring system for their predictions, all for the purpose of lying about a lop sided 7-1 game) would have to be considerably large.
I think the the better, and frankly incredibly blindingly obvious, way to look at this is that this was just an unusual game that nobody expected and you can maybe take a break today from being suspicious about the whole world being manipulated by a nefarious few who conspire to create every fucking notable turn in history to screw you or someone else over.
But it's fun to think of "Illuminati".