Round of 32
Round of 16
Quarterfinals
Semifinals
Final
Prediction Theory
Elo ratings
Every team starts at a base rating and is updated after each historical match using a standard Elo formula: the favorite gains less for an expected win, the underdog gains more for an upset. A home-field bonus is applied for non-neutral matches, and a margin-of-victory multiplier means a 4–0 win shifts ratings more than a 1–0 win. Ratings are computed walk-forward through ~49,000 historical international matches, so each prediction only ever uses information that would have been available before that match was played.
Recent form
Alongside Elo, each team's points-per-game over its last 10 matches (3 for a win, 1 for a draw) is tracked as a separate signal — capturing short-term momentum that a slower-moving Elo rating alone can miss.
The model
A gradient-boosted classifier is trained on Elo ratings, Elo difference, form, form difference, and a neutral-venue flag for every historical match, predicting the probability of a home win, draw, or away win. For knockout matches — which can't end in a draw — the draw probability is split evenly between the two teams before picking a winner.
How reliable is this? (backtested accuracy)
This same model (retrained from scratch on data available before each tournament, so no future leakage) was run against the actual 2014, 2018, and 2022 World Cups:
| Tournament | 3-class accuracy | Knockout winner accuracy |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 Brazil | 65.6% | 75.0% |
| 2018 Russia | 53.1% | 56.2% |
| 2022 Qatar | 46.9% | 62.5% |
| Combined (192 matches) | 55.2% | — |
Roughly 55% exact-outcome accuracy and ~55–65% knockout-winner accuracy across three real tournaments — clearly better than chance (33% for a random guess among home/draw/away) and better than always picking the favorite, but far from certain. Confidence is reasonably well calibrated in the middle of the range (matches the model called at 60–70% confidence were right 69% of the time) but gets noisier at the extremes. Football stays genuinely upset-prone: in 2022 alone, Saudi Arabia beat Argentina, Japan beat both Germany and Spain, and Morocco reached the semifinal.
Why this bracket is a projection
The group stage is still being played. Any group match that hasn't kicked off yet is resolved using the model's single most-likely outcome, and standings are updated accordingly to determine each group's winner, runner-up, and whether its third-place team is among the 8 best third-place finishers overall. The official FIFA rule for which third-place finisher lands in which Round-of-32 slot is a published allocation table this app doesn't have access to — instead, it finds *a* valid assignment respecting each slot's eligible groups. Every later round then follows automatically from "if the model's pick wins every prior match." Treat this as "the most likely single path through the bracket," not a probability-weighted forecast of who's most likely to win the tournament overall.