Mexico v South Africa · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇲🇽 Mexico CONCACAF Elo 1,875 · world 13th

69 / 21 / 10 win · draw · win most likely 2–0

🇿🇦 South Africa CAF Elo 1,518 · world 80th

Group: A
Date: Thursday 11 June 2026
Kick-off: 19:00 UTC
Venue: Mexico City Stadium, Mexico City

§ 01

The scoreline grid

The ensemble's full distribution over exact scorelines — Mexico goals down the side, South Africa goals across the top. This is the same 11×11 grid the tournament simulator samples.

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group A

Mexico v South Africa — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Mexico scores k) and P(South Africa scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.10% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Mexico favourites at 68.8%, with a 21.2% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 2–0 (14.5%), but no exact score clears 15% — the distribution is broad, as it should be.

Source · Oxford Football Forecasting model

§ 02

Result, goals & totals

The grid marginalised into the outcome split, expected goals each side, and the goal-total markets — every figure read straight off the same distribution.

Win · draw · loss

68.8% 21.2% 10%

🇲🇽 Mexico 68.8% Draw 21.2% 🇿🇦 South Africa 10%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇲🇽Mexico 1.98

🇿🇦South Africa 0.62

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.60.

48.3% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

51.7% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

40.7% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

2–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 14.5%

§ 03

Venue context

The conditions at Mexico City Stadium, Mexico City — the same environment layer the dossiers' climate exposure draws on.

Azteca Mexico City, Mexico

Heat index 25°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 24°C June–July daily high

Humidity 66% relative humidity

Altitude 2,287m high-altitude venue

Source · Open-Meteo & venue records. Travel and time-zone exposure are per-team — see each side's dossier.

§ 04

Why the model leans this way

The inputs behind the grid — each side's strength signals laid side by side. The forecast is the ensemble's, not a hand-weighting of these; this panel is the descriptive read.

1,875 Elo rating 1,518

1.80 Recent NT form 1.73

€289M Squad value €52M

0.155 Squad form (global) 0.091

0.689 Fitness readiness 0.749

−0.40 Decoupling g −0.50

Mexico carry the Elo edge (357 points). On the decoupling axis, Mexico is the side whose squad is valued higher relative to its record.

How a single-match forecast is built

The pairing is scored by the ensemble — Dixon-Coles bivariate-Poisson, the Bayesian hierarchical model and the global LightGBM-Poisson, log-pooled — yielding the 11×11 scoreline grid above. Win/draw/loss, expected goals (λ), over-2.5 and both-teams-to-score are all marginals of that one grid, so they are mutually consistent by construction. The strength inputs shown here feed the models; the forecast is their pooled output, not a manual weighting of these rows. The model matches the market out-of-sample (RPS 0.1891 vs 0.1905); it does not significantly beat it at n = 3. The ensemble, in full →