England v Croatia · Oxford Football Forecasting

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England UEFA Elo 2,021 · world 4th

48 / 30 / 22 win · draw · win most likely 1–0

🇭🇷 Croatia UEFA Elo 1,911 · world 17th

Group: L
Date: Wednesday 17 June 2026
Kick-off: 20:00 UTC
Venue: Dallas Stadium, Arlington

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group L

England v Croatia — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(England scores k) and P(Croatia scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.01% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes England favourites at 47.8%, with a 30.5% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 1–0 (14.8%), 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

47.8% 30.5% 21.7%

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England 47.8% Draw 30.5% 🇭🇷 Croatia 21.7%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿England 1.32

🇭🇷Croatia 0.80

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.12.

35.6% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

64.4% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

41.4% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

1–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 14.8%

§ 03

Venue context

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

AT&T Arlington, USA

Heat index 45°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 35°C June–July daily high

Humidity 62% relative humidity

Altitude 177m 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.

2,021 Elo rating 1,911

2.47 Recent NT form 2.13

€1878M Squad value €370M

0.410 Squad form (global) 0.334

0.807 Fitness readiness 0.844

−0.01 Decoupling g +0.46

England carry the Elo edge (110 points). On the decoupling axis, Croatia 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 →