Ghana v Panama · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇬🇭 Ghana CAF Elo 1,510 · world 94th

33 / 32 / 35 win · draw · win most likely 1–1

🇵🇦 Panama CONCACAF Elo 1,730 · world 32nd

Group: L
Date: Wednesday 17 June 2026
Kick-off: 23:00 UTC
Venue: Toronto Stadium, Toronto

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group L

Ghana v Panama — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Ghana scores k) and P(Panama scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.00% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Panama favourites at 34.9%, with a 32.1% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 1–1 (14.6%), 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

33% 32.1% 34.9%

🇬🇭 Ghana 33% Draw 32.1% 🇵🇦 Panama 34.9%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇬🇭Ghana 1.03

🇵🇦Panama 1.07

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.10.

35.1% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

64.9% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

43.4% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

1–1 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 14.6%

§ 03

Venue context

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

BMO Field Toronto, Canada

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

Max temperature 25°C June–July daily high

Humidity 71% relative humidity

Altitude 81m 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.

1,510 Elo rating 1,730

1.33 Recent NT form 1.67

€291M Squad value €38M

0.187 Squad form (global) 0.123

0.689 Fitness readiness 0.572

+0.34 Decoupling g −0.35

Panama carry the Elo edge (220 points). On the decoupling axis, Ghana 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 →