00:05The unpredictable nature of football's greatest stage makes the World Cup such an intriguing
00:10spectacle. And it's why we call in the experts, like Paul the Octopus, quite the successful
00:21psychic cephalopod when it came to predicting World Cup matches in 2010. Hatched at Weymouth's
00:30SeaLife Centre in England, Paul earned a transfer to Oberhausen in Germany, where his Oracle career
00:36began in the 2008 Euro tournament and continued in the 2010 World Cup, garnering an impressive
00:44strike rate of 85.7%. Paul made his selections by choosing a muscle from one of two boxes
00:53bearing the flags of competing nations. And as his winning record improved, the world's
01:00media turned him into a cult figure. He correctly tipped all seven of Germany's matches in the
01:06World Cup, including their defeat by Spain in the semi-final and their win in the third-placed
01:12playoff. And he also got Spain right in their win in the final over Netherlands. Paul received
01:20a number of death threats, mostly to turn him into calamari. But whether they came from a
01:26disgruntled German chef or a mean-spirited Dutch gourmand, they could never get their tentacles
01:32on him. Some questioned the validity of his predictions. But in truth, he was a genius.
01:41The easiest thing to try to explain it is that he has nine brains and we have one. So how
01:47can we know
01:48what he thinks? Paul paved the way for other football predicting animals, from an elephant to a sea lion
01:55to a polar bear. But they only dared to dream of Paul's prowess. Although he passed away soon
02:03after the 2010 tournament, Paul, like so many of the game's great players, inked his name on football's
02:10greatest stage.
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