Title-win probability
How this is built
- Team strength. Each team carries an Elo rating calibrated on 900+ real internationals.
- Match model. The Elo gap between two teams sets their expected goals. A Dixon-Coles-corrected Poisson distribution turns that into exact win/draw/loss probabilities, fixing plain Poisson's under-count of low-scoring draws like 0-0 and 1-1.
- Tournament. A pot-seeded 12-group draw, a full group stage, best-third-place qualification, then a seeded knockout bracket, simulated start to finish tens of thousands of times to get a championship probability per team.
Simplifications worth knowing: host advantage is a flat rating bonus rather than venue-specific, and the knockout bracket is Elo-seeded rather than following the official FIFA pairing table exactly. Elo ratings sourced from the world-cup-2026-prediction-model project (MIT licensed). This is a probability model, not betting advice.