Every four years millions of fans try to answer the same question: who will win the World Cup? Experts talk about Portugal, Germany, Argentina. The mathematician Joachim Clementwho would have predicted the last two winners also has his pool: Netherlands.
But a team of scientists from the University of Innsbruck has decidedor pose this challenge on a scale impossible for any human being. Instead of analyzing a few games or reviewing historical statistics, they used a mathematical model capable of simulating 100,000 complete World Cups.
The result is surprising. After virtually playing one hundred thousand tournaments, artificial intelligence points to a clear favorite to lift the trophy at the 2026 World Cup. And, according to the authors, the probabilities Calculated by some bookmakers could be seriously underestimating the chances of certain teams. But before getting to the winner, it is important to understand how to play a World Cup that does not yet exist. Soccer has a reputation for being one of the most difficult sports to predict.
In basketball or tennis the best team or player usually wins because there are many points and opportunities to correct mistakes. In soccer, on the other hand, a rebound, an expulsion or a chance goal can decide an entire game. That is why the scientists, led by Andreas Groll, they did not attempt to predict a single outcome. What they did was something similar to flipping a coin thousands of times.
If a coin has a 50% chance of landing heads, we cannot know what will happen on the next toss. But Yes, we can estimate quite accurately how many times heads will appear after one hundred thousand attempts. And Groll’s team applied that same logic to the World Cup.
The model used historical data, international rankings, recent team performance and other statistical indicators to estimate the relative strength of each team. From there the simulation began. Every game was played virtually over and over again. Then the entire tournament was completed. And then another. And another one. Thus until reaching the absurd figure of 100,000 simulated World Cups.
The goal was not to find out what exactly will happen in July 2026, but to calculate which teams are most likely to advance round after round and end up lifting the cup. The challenge was not easy since The 2026 edition is one of the most complicated to predict: for the first time they will participate 48 selectionscompared to the usual 32 and instead of the usual 64 matches, there is talk of more than 100. In statistical terms, the “noise” of the system increases.
It is true that models can analyze millions of data, but they still cannot measure factors such as psychological pressure, last-minute injuries, internal conflicts or the impact of an exceptional generation of players. On the low side of the table, Those who had the least chance (they did not win a single one of the 100,000 simulations) were the teams of Jordan, Qatar and Iraq. Cape Verde, for its part, won one of the 10,000 simulations.
And at the top of the table, the first surprise is that the top five turned out to be European, with Argentina in sixth position and Brazil eighth. Fifth place went to Portugal, the fourth for Germany, the bronze for France and the final: England-Spain, with the gold for the latter. Spain would have been crowned winners 14.5% of the time, while England won 12% of the cups. The good news for fans is that football continues to resist certainties. Because even when an artificial intelligence has played the tournament a hundred thousand times, there is still room for surprise. And perhaps that is precisely the reason why we continue to watch each World Cup with the same enthusiasm.