So here's what we're going to do.

A fairly easy way to account for how many points each country can expect to get, on average, is simply to look at how they did in the last few years. There are a couple of countries who bounce around all over the place – getting high scores one year then crashing out in the semis the next (shoutout to the Netherlands) – but lots of countries are really quite consistent.

So the first thing we do to predict the result is take the last five years' scores and make a weighted average of them. This means we're going to give more importance to last year's results than to five years ago – this takes a little bit of momentum into account. If you did great in 2011 but rubbish last year, you'll do worse on our metric then if you did the opposite.

This system (which, remember, ignores the actual songs entirely) gives us the following top five:

1. Sweden

2. Russia

3. Italy

4. Azerbaijan

5. Ukraine