2026 FIFA World Cup — Bracket Projection
48 teams. Full per-round advancement probabilities from the Resolve v1 Elo bracket Monte Carlo, pre-registered 2026-06-07 — four days before the tournament opens. Bracket re-runs after group stage; the pre-reg lock means no quiet model swaps post-results. Sister model (v3 calibrated) shown below the main board.
The Bracket
loading…48 teams sorted by P(Champion). Click any column header to re-sort. P(R32) = chance of getting out of the group; P(Champ) = chance of lifting the trophy.
Group Stage
12 groups · top 2 + best-thirds advanceEach card shows the four teams in a group, sorted by their probability of advancing out of the group (P(R32) from the Elo Monte Carlo).
v3 Calibrated Picks
our-elo top-20 · fit on 4 historical WCs
Different methodology from the bracket above. v3 fits the historical formula
outcome_ord = 1.381 + 2.736 × pct_in_top20 on the last four
World Cups (2010 / 2014 / 2018 / 2022), where pct_in_top20 = share of a
country's squad that ranks in the top 20 of our own club Elo at tournament
start. Top 10 below — bold contrarian shifts called out in the methodology note.
Methodology + Honesty Notes
pre-reg locked 2026-06-07What's in the bracket model (v1):
- Per-team Elo at tournament start (FIFA-style with K=32, blended with club-form proxy).
- Monte Carlo bracket sim — group stage + knockout simulated together; probabilities are share-of-sims outcomes.
- Host-nation boost applied to USA / Mexico / Canada.
- Confidence flag per team (high / medium / low) based on data coverage.
v3 calibrated: we built our own club Elo from 28,967 matches across 5 European leagues × 16 seasons. For each historical WC, we counted how many squad members had a club ranked in our top-20 at tournament start (pct_in_top20). Fitted a 1-feature linear model to outcome ordinal (champion = 4, finalist = 3.5, ..., group-stage = 1.5). Robustness retest: 4 of 5 N-values beat v2 on champion hits.
Bold v3 contrarian shifts vs v1 Elo:
- ★ UPGRADES: Ghana 47→17 (Δ+30), Ivory Coast 34→12 (Δ+22), Sweden 38→18 (Δ+20), Belgium 21→7 (Δ+14), Senegal 22→10, US 26→13, Cape Verde 44→30
- ★ DOWNGRADES: Colombia 7→35 (Δ-28), Iran 23→39, Japan 15→27, Australia 24→36, Argentina 2→6, Brazil 5→9
Why we surface both: v1 has the cleaner per-round bracket probabilities (Monte Carlo). v3 has stronger historical fit for the squad-club-form signal but doesn't natively produce a full bracket. They disagree most where v3's squad-quality lens differs from v1's Elo summary — those disagreements are surfaced rather than averaged away.
Cardinal rules: raw data only as model inputs (no third-party predicted-winner models consumed as features); pre-reg before compute; post-tournament scorecard locked at pre-reg time, evaluated honestly when the tournament closes.