Of course, there was a paper that came out about a year ago that basically said that of all the major sports, football was statistically the least predictable. Basically this means that you need to change the formula used by the ELO rankings so that it is much flatter than the equation that Wolfram has chosen here. Once that has been done, the error bars on he predictions just sky-rocket.

To give a concrete example from this World Cup; Germany thrashed Australia in their first match, 4-0. Germany then went on to be beaten by Serbia in a closely fought match 1-0, and then Serbia was dominated by Australia in the last round of group matches, 2-1. Other groups have had the world champions - Italy, and runner-ups, France, knocked out of the competition in the group stages, yet none of the current models predicted that either. Makes their value quite dubious, in my opinion.