Saudi Arabia v Uruguay · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia AFC Elo 1,569 · world 75th

11 / 26 / 63 win · draw · win most likely 0–1

🇺🇾 Uruguay CONMEBOL Elo 1,892 · world 14th

Group: H
Date: Monday 15 June 2026
Kick-off: 22:00 UTC
Venue: Miami Stadium, Miami Gardens

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group H

Saudi Arabia v Uruguay — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Saudi Arabia scores k) and P(Uruguay scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.03% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Uruguay favourites at 63.2%, with a 25.5% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 0–1 (17.7%), but no exact score clears 18% — 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

11.3% 25.5% 63.2%

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia 11.3% Draw 25.5% 🇺🇾 Uruguay 63.2%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇸🇦Saudi Arabia 0.55

🇺🇾Uruguay 1.63

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.18.

37.2% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

62.8% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

34.7% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

0–1 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 17.7%

§ 03

Venue context

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

Hard Rock Miami Gardens, USA

Heat index 42°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 31°C June–July daily high

Humidity 82% relative humidity

Altitude 13m above sea level

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.

1,569 Elo rating 1,892

1.53 Recent NT form 1.47

€38M Squad value €589M

0.090 Squad form (global) 0.287

0.679 Fitness readiness 0.740

−0.34 Decoupling g −0.15

Uruguay carry the Elo edge (323 points). On the decoupling axis, Uruguay 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 →