What this is
A Monte-Carlo simulator that plays the 2026 World Cup tens of thousands of times and reports how often each team reaches each stage. As real group results land, every number is recomputed conditioned on them — the Pre-tourney / Now toggles compare the prediction against the live picture (same seed and sim count, so the gap is signal, not noise). Pre-tourney uses each team's Elo as it stood on the eve of the tournament, before any match moved it.
The Trends tab replays that story match by match: each team's odds at every stage, from the pre-tournament forecast through today. Strength is held at the pre-tournament Elo across the whole timeline, so the lines move only as results come in — not from rating drift.
How the model works
- Team strength — one World Football Elo rating per team; a rating gap becomes an expected-goals edge.
- Match scores — that edge sets two Poisson goal averages, drawn into a scoreline (so draws happen at realistic rates).
- Hosts — Mexico, USA and Canada carry a home-field rating bonus in every match.
- Knockout ties — settled by a rating-weighted coin flip, standing in for extra time and penalties.
- Group tiebreak — the real 2026 FIFA order: points → head-to-head (points, GD, goals) → overall GD → overall goals → ranking.
- Bracket — FIFA's exact Round-of-32 slotting and the official 495-row third-place allocation table (Annex C).
Sources
- Ratings — World Football Elo, eloratings.net (snapshot —).
- Group fixtures, dates & venues — the twelve 2026 World Cup group-stage pages on Wikipedia.
- Live results — openfootball/worldcup.json (public-domain, scores overlaid onto the fixtures as games finish).
- Knockout structure & third-place table — FIFA tournament regulations (Annex C), via the 2026 World Cup knockout-stage article.
Caveats
- Every run carries Monte-Carlo sampling noise — about ±0.5pt on a coin-flip outcome at 40k sims. Read small differences as directional.
- Ratings are a fixed scenario, not a live feed: no in-tournament form, injuries, or squad changes.
- Knockout ties and penalty shootouts are a rating-weighted coin flip, not a separate model.
- The group tiebreak applies head-to-head once across the tied teams; FIFA's rare recursive re-application isn't reproduced.
- This is an exploration tool, not betting advice.