“Whoever Joachim Löw takes with him, we will win the title this year, not only because a super-fit team will turn up on June 11,” Professor Metin Tolan told the news agency DDP on Saturday. Tolan’s total confidence is based on a formula he describes in his book The Physics of Football.

According to Tolan’s analysis, Germany reached an average 3.7th place in previous World Cups. “On top of this, we always had a particularly strong team every four to five years,” he added.

“According to my initial formula, we should have become world champions in 1970, 1986 and 2006, but in fact we became champions in 1974 and 1990.” This led to Tolan’s conclusion, “The mathematical formula of sine and cosine always predicts a World Cup victory four years too early. That is why winning the title this year is inevitable.”

Tolan also had valuable advice for the German players in free-kick situations: “To achieve success – in other words, to score a goal – my calculations say the free-kick-takers must strike the ball at a point 70 percent from its centre. Most professionals achieve this through constant training,” said the 44-year-old Stuttgart fan, who is donating the income from his book to physics scholarships at Dortmund’s technical university.

The professor scoffed at recent surveys that predicted that Germany would not get beyond the quarter finals, pointing out that Jürgen Klinsmann’s team in the 2006 World Cup were also heavily criticized before the tournament. Tolan said that those criticisms were more justified than those of the current team, but “the result was, we played a very good World Cup,” he said.

Löw named a preliminary squad of 27 players on Thursday, four of whom must still be eliminated.