Just to furnish your comment with some more detail. Quants calculate the risks attached to financial instruments. So they can tell you, statistically, what losses may be incurred on an asset in a given time frame or how you should hedge the risks attached to a complex financial security with simpler, more liquid securities. Now, of course quants can't predict the future, but they can (or at least should be able to) prepare you for future eventualities by assigning future eventualities with a probabilistic distribution.

So quants are well accustomed to considering future events, designing models of the future and identifying critical factors that future outcomes are particularly sensitive to. So by considering future dependencies and what-if scenarios, and then attempting to measuring these outcomes, quants are well qualified to model what may happen in the world cup. Now we know there is major unpredictability in sport--this is particularly true for football (soccer), and more so in a cup-format tournament--so much like their analysis of CDOs and other funky products, don't be surprised to discover they are all wrong!

Just my tuppence worth.

The pictures should be removed as Wikipedia is a non-prophet organisation.

Sorry, was that obvious?