Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
WEIGHTS = {
'w_xg': 0.09,
'w_goals': -0.07,
'w_star': 0.018,
'w_value': 0.18,
'w_rank': 0.4,
'w_def': -0.12,
'xga_share': 0.85,
'w_gk': 0.0042
}
$ python3 worldcup_model.py --sims 100000
2026 FIFA World Cup -- championship probabilities (100,000 simulations, from Round of 32)
1. England 11.7% *
2. France 10.0% *
3. Spain 9.3% *
4. Argentina 8.4%
5. Germany 8.1%
Seems weird to wait to run the "prospective" simulation until the World Cup is already in progress. Although it seems that the model also needs to use "the actual bracket and group-stage performance". So it's not prospective?
Here's hoping they were right for England as well, but we'll find out soon enough.
> limitations, principally the small number of tournaments available for validation and the risk of in-sample weight selection
But I agree this model is no more valuable than Paul the Octopus.
[1]yes, both of those are endogenous variables...
Get a few nice glamorshots and make sure you have something else in the queue before then to plug during the interviews.
Good models need a lot of data. Can you really be accurate with what, 30 data points, in which the team composition is basically reset each time?
In the average country players agree the bonus conditions with their Federation.
Since that article was published, England had the red card ban for Quansah extended to two games instead of one with no appeal so he couldn't play against Argentina if England were to get that far, and shortly after equalising in the quarter final Switzerland had a red card for a second yellow against Embolo for diving which had originally been given to Argentina. If you don't know, there is no right for VAR to give a yellow card in this case - it can only be done if it's mistaken identity, which is what they claimed. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jul/12/switzerland...
Now of course none of this is evidence of bias, but it's worth noting that this has been happening after claims of pro-Argentina bias has been widespread enough that the BBC and other institutions wrote about it.
Nobody with an adult understanding of sport honestly believes that the ban for Quansah is some sort of conspiracy to guarantee Argentina won. I mean, apart from him getting the normal ban for a bad tackle, the only chance he'd get of making the starting lineup against Argentina was as an out-of-position option that would by marginally easier for Argentina to play against.
The "mistaken identity" rule was very clearly changed before the World Cup to allow it to be used to review decisions when the referee mistakenly carded a player or awarded a penalty for something actually caused by his opponent (not just when he booked a different player on the same team). Your assertion is simply false, as your own link confirms. Also, of the few "mistaken identity" decision reversals, Embolo's ridiculous dive to try to [initially] get his opponent into trouble was by far the most obvious and deserving. But yes, losing sides will generally whinge more about rule changes which mean their player can't get away with cheating like he might have done in the past than they will about their player's decision to cheat costing them a game they might have won.
Really, the only major decision involving Argentina that's not completely consistent with other games was Messi avoiding trouble for accidentally studding an opponent's calf (a bit like the much-debated Balogun incident) in a low pressure group stage game, and we don't need a massive conspiracy to understand match officials might be scared to send off the world's most famous player in his last tournament for an inconsequential bit of clumsiness, if they even saw it clearly.
-- Egypt was robbed.
They also missed a potentially tricky first knockout round tie against local rivals Uruguay because Uruguay underperformed and Cape Verde unexpectedly overperformed.
Since ancient times in Rome where they said "bread and games" are needed to keep the commoners happy, many generations of rulers had time to optimize large-scale sports events.
My personal theory is that these kind of extremely unfair decisions in football are a net benefit to stability of society, and there's no incentive for the leadership to aim for full fairness in sports.
Hear me out: When a team loses in unfair manner due to bad decisions of the referee, large masses of people feel the psychological pain of being robbed of a win. This feeling of "unfairness" makes the masses more resilient to experiencing "unfairness" in their day-to-day life, for example when a billionaire is not prosecuted in the same way than a common person.
If we turn the logic around and assume that football would always be perfectly fair, then the masses would demand the same kind of fairness also in their day-to-day lives. Obviously this demand for fairness is not aligned with an establishment class that wants to extract the maximum value possible from their citizens, and push as far as they can without risking stability of the country.
From an establishment perspective, it makes a lot of sense to condition the masses for "unfairness", and sports is the perfect way to do it. I'm not saying that the individual referees are paid off to let a certain country win, just that the establishment who runs each country (and thereby also run international sports organizations like FIFA) have no incentive to actually create total fairness.
This might also explain issues like the IOC re-instating russia for olympic games, even though they have not retreated from Ukrainian territory yet. It triggers people who strongly feel about morals and ethics, and it brings the point home that the world is unfair and it makes no sense to push for fairness in the greater context.
The benefit is psychological conditioning for people to accept unfairness.
edit: replaced "soccer" with "football"
It's FIFA World Cup - Fédération Internationale de Football Association. Football, not soccer.
Probably because the sport is called [association football] of which soccer is one of the short forms (from the British) same as football, and is generally used to distinguish itself in places where other sports from the same football category are prevalent.
FIFA is an association that governs various association football variants including futsal. Using acronym expansion on FIFA as a canonical source for what to call any particular variant of association football would be misguided.