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Spain will be runners-up and the Netherlands will come third, according to a statistical forecast by JP Morgan.
While they concede that Brazil are the world's number one team, they say the South American five-time winners face a tough group stage and are likely to be knocked out before reaching the final.
Analysts Matthew Burgess and Marco Dion took data on Fifa rankings, previous football results and bookmakers' odds, then used them in a quantitative analysis model - or Quant Model - designed for assessing the value of stocks.
Their results are contained in a 69-page report covering topics ranging from dealing with penalty shoot-outs and the shape of the team to "price trend metrics".
The report says: "Having developed a rather successful Quant Model over the years, we intend to introduce it to our readers and also use its methodology to apply it to a fruitful field for statistics: Football and the World Cup."
The JP Morgan pair freely admit that their predictions should be taken "with a pinch of salt", but viewed the World Cup as "an ideal opportunity to light-heartedly explain quantitative techniques and demystify the typical Quant framework".
Analysis of share prices can often become self-fulfilling prophecies, as markets can react to predictions, but it is difficult to see how football results could be influenced in the same way.
Rival experts at UBS, who successfully foresaw Italy's 2006 victory, have predicted a Brazil win.
The official Fifa rankings put England in eighth position, with Brazil first and Spain second.
From Sky News site, what a load of......
