About this 2026 World Cup simulator
What this is
A free Monte-Carlo simulator that plays the 2026 World Cup tens of thousands of times to estimate each team's odds of winning the tournament — who the favorites are, and how often every team reaches each stage. As real group results land, every prediction is recomputed conditioned on them — the Pre-tourney / Now toggles compare the forecast 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 — a frozen snapshot from the twelve 2026 World Cup group-stage pages on Wikipedia. The schedule itself doesn't change; only scores update.
- Live results — openfootball/worldcup.json (public-domain, scores overlaid onto the fixtures within about an hour of full-time).
- 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.
Common questions
- Who's the favorite to win the 2026 World Cup?
- Open the Title race tab — teams are ranked by their simulated odds of lifting the trophy, and the order shifts as real results come in.
- When and where is the 2026 World Cup?
- 11 June to 19 July 2026, with 48 teams playing across 16 host cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico — the first three-nation, 48-team World Cup.
- How does the simulator predict the World Cup?
- Each team gets a World Football Elo rating; a rating gap becomes an expected-goals edge, which sets two Poisson goal averages drawn into a scoreline. Play that out for all 104 matches, tens of thousands of times, and count how often each team reaches each stage. See How the model works above.
- How often do the odds update?
- The live picture is rebuilt within about an hour of each result landing. Between updates the numbers hold steady — the model conditions on results, not on minute-to-minute news.
- Is this an official FIFA tool?
- No. It's an independent, free exploration project. The bracket and third-place rules follow FIFA's real 2026 format, but the predictions are this model's own.