Iraq v Norway · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇮🇶 Iraq AFC Elo 1,618 · world 56th

8 / 20 / 72 win · draw · win most likely 0–2

🇳🇴 Norway UEFA Elo 1,914 · world 15th

Group: I
Date: Tuesday 16 June 2026
Kick-off: 22:00 UTC
Venue: Boston Stadium, Foxborough

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group I

Iraq v Norway — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Iraq scores k) and P(Norway scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.12% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Norway favourites at 71.9%, with a 20.0% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 0–2 (15.7%), but no exact score clears 16% — 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

20% 71.9%

🇮🇶 Iraq 8.1% Draw 20% 🇳🇴 Norway 71.9%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇮🇶Iraq 0.54

🇳🇴Norway 2.03

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.57.

47.4% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

52.6% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

37.0% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

0–2 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 15.7%

§ 03

Venue context

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

Gillette Foxborough, USA

Heat index 29°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 27°C June–July daily high

Humidity 74% relative humidity

Altitude 83m 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.

1,618 Elo rating 1,914

2.00 Recent NT form 2.40

€23M Squad value €580M

0.095 Squad form (global) 0.299

0.458 Fitness readiness 0.777

−0.55 Decoupling g +0.24

Norway carry the Elo edge (296 points). On the decoupling axis, Norway 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 →