Abstract: World Cup as an international event is increasingly attracting the attention of the public, the team strength and performance evaluation are always a hot topic. Football tactics performance analysis shows that the match results are closely related to the teams’ statistical indicators, which make the objective and scientific evaluation of the team comprehensive strength become feasible. In this research, clustering analysis and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) methods are used to evaluate the comprehensive strength of the World Cup teams. On the basis of the statistical indicators and the results of 2010 World Cup, a model is built to find out which are the most influential statistical indicators. In addition, the statistical indicators and the results of 2014 World Cup in Brazil are used to verify the model. The experimental results show that the average interception, average shooting number, ball possession number and long success rate are the most influential statistical indicators to reflect the team strength. To a certain extent, the statistical indicators of the group match can predict the promotion results.

Key words: World Cup, comprehensive rank, clustering analysis, principal component analysis, football tactics performance