The ball is already rolling on the 2026 World Cup and the usual question floats again in every conversation: who will end up lifting the World Cup? Trying to answer it is usually an exercise in intuition, patriotism and some superstition. But Steven Stern, a professor of data science at Bond University in Australia, decided to put hunches aside and turn to science.

To do this, he built a system capable of simulating the tournament a million times. The model calculates the probabilities of each team to overcome each round until reaching the final and, finally, being crowned champion.

The result?

Spain appears as the slight favorite to win the title, although by such a narrow margin that any excess of confidence would be premature. La Roja has a 15.8% chance of winning the World Cup, just ahead of France (15.6%) and Argentina (15.3%). England is in fourth place with 11%, further behind the leading trio. According to the analysis, that difference could be partly due to England's drop in the rankings after their loss to Japan in March.

The “Group of Nine” continues to rule

These four are the only teams above 10% and they all belong to what the study calls the “group of nine”, Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Since 1998 this club has shared 78.6% of the places in the semifinals and one hundred percent of the finals. The last champion outside this club was Uruguay, in 1950.

Argentina, Brazil and Latin American options

For Latin America, the most notable news is the strength of Argentina. The current world champion is not only among the top contenders for the title, but also has a probability of close to 25% of reaching the final according to simulations. Brazil also appears among the teams with real chances, although well behind the main quartet, with a 4.9% chance of winning the tournament. Further behind are Colombia (2.1%), Mexico (1.6%) and Uruguay (1.4%), all with modest title options, but not zero.

To put together his projections, Stern turned to FIFA's Elo system, a method that measures the relative strength of each team based on its results and the quality of the opponents it faced, adjusting the scores game by game. To this he added a goal difference distribution based on research by German Andreas Heuer, which allowed him to incorporate goal differences into the simulations and model the development of the tournament more realistically.

48 teams, more surprises in the 2026 World Cup?

The 2026 World Cup also breaks the mold, for the first time there will be 48 teams in 12 groups of four, with an extra knockout round and a jump from 64 to 104 games in total.

And what does the model say about this new format? That the door opens a little, although not wide. The simulations indicate that the nine historical powers would occupy around 54.2% of the places in the semifinals, well below the usual 78.6%, and the probability that the champion leaves that club falls to 72.6%, far from the 100% that marked recent history (with the exception that this time Italy did not even qualify).

In other words, the usual guys continue to rule, but the room for surprise grows. Not to the point of turning a modest team into a candidate for the title, but enough for second-string teams to dream of going further than usual.

For Stern, if FIFA had opted for groups of six instead of stretching the number of teams, the distribution would have been even more even, although at the price of playing 136 games instead of 104.

If the simulations are close to reality, the 2026 World Cup could offer something unusual: greater balance. Spain, France and Argentina will continue to be the usual names, but the format seems willing, for once, to leave a crack open to those who seek to break decades of established order.

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