Paul (hatched January 2006) is a common octopus living in a tank at a Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany, who is an animal oracle and now retired predictor of football matches, usually international matches in which Germany was playing. He came to worldwide attention with his accurate predictions in the 2010 World Cup.

During a divination, Paul was presented with two boxes containing food in the form of a mussel, each marked with the flag of a national football team in an upcoming match. He chose the box with the flag of the winning team in four of Germany’s six Euro 2008 matches, and in all seven of their matches in the 2010 World Cup. He correctly predicted a win for Spain against the Netherlands in the World Cup final on 11 July by eating the mussel in the box with the Spanish flag on it. His predictions have thus been 100% (8/8) correct for the 2010 World Cup and 86% (12/14) correct overall. Paul was retired after the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Paul’s career as an oracle began during the UEFA Euro 2008 tournament. In the lead-up to Germany’s international football matches, Paul was presented with two clear plastic boxes, each containing food: a mussel or an oyster. Each container was marked with the flag of a team, one the flag of Germany, and the other the flag of Germany’s opponent. The box which Paul opened first (and ate the contents of) was judged to be the predicted winner of the game.

Paul’s apparent success was comparable to a run of luck when tossing a coin. This connection has been made by Professor Chris Budd of the University of Bath, Professor David Spiegelharter of Cambridge University, and Etienne Roquain of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.

Under the hypothesis that Paul was equally likely to choose the winner or the loser of a match, and neglecting the possibility of a draw, he had a 1/2 chance of predicting a single result and a 1/256 chance of predicting eight in a row. Spiegelharter and Roquain point out that there are “other animals that have attempted but failed to predict the outcome of football matches”; it is not remarkable that one animal is more successful than the others (including humans), and only the successful animals gains public attention after the fact. However, if Paul or other octopuses felt attracted for whatever reasons to the flagged boxes of Germany or Spain, their predictions would be much more exact than tossing a coin.

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4. FIFA World Cup 2010
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