Are Brazil and Germany overvalued as bets for this year's World Cup winner? Would a prudent speculator on football matches find the discounted Czech team a potentially better bet?

Most crucially, does Fifa, football's international governing body, calculate the rankings for the World Cup in ways that result in inefficient assignments of respective valuations of the teams? These are the questions posed in "What Price Champions: A Value Investing Perspective on Soccer's World Cup," a report by the Brandes Institute, the think-tank division of Brandes Investment Partners. The Institute's conclusion: Fifa's method of assigning values to teams results in undervaluing the odds of the non-favourites.