In just a few hours, seventeen countries will compete for the final ten spots in Saturday's Grand Final. After months of preparation, who will advance?
With Semi-Final 1 in the books, we now know most of the countries who will compete in Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final. Later today, seventeen more countries will compete for the final ten spots. Who's it gonna be?
A quick recap about the methodology we used to generate these predictions: each member of the WEIO Eurovision coverage team (Ben, Mike, Ryan) ranked the entries three times. The first ranking was just to get a sense of what we liked and didn’t once all the entries were selected, and does not factor into our final scores. For our second and third rankings, we individually compared each entry against the others in the field asking the question “which entry is more likely to qualify.” (You might be surprised how much some entries changed from ranking to ranking!) We also incorporated the press center votes, YouTube views of the second rehearsal videos, and the betting odds from Oddschecker.com. Then some math determined the ten best-scoring entries.
Our official prediction for the second Eurovision Song Contest Semi Final, in alphabetical order, is:
The group was much more in agreement about this semi-final; seven of the ten countries we predict will advance landed in the top ten of all categories. (The WEIO team was also fairly consistent in our rankings within the top ten, with all three of us predicting the exact same finish for Israel.) Of the remaining seven countries in this semi-final -- Cyprus, Czech Republic, Ireland, Montenegro, Portugal, San Marino, Switzerland -- none showed up in the top ten of more than two categories, and two were completely shut out.
The second semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest airs live at 9pm CET / 3pm Eastern / 12pm Pacific and can be watched on the official Eurovision page. Good luck to everyone!