Portugal v Congo DR · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇵🇹 Portugal UEFA Elo 1,986 · world 7th

66 / 24 / 10 win · draw · win most likely 1–0

🇨🇩 Congo DR CAF Elo 1,661

Group: K
Date: Wednesday 17 June 2026
Kick-off: 17:00 UTC
Venue: Houston Stadium, Houston

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group K

Portugal v Congo DR — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Portugal scores k) and P(Congo DR scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.04% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Portugal favourites at 65.4%, with a 24.2% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 1–0 (17.2%), but no exact score clears 17% — 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

65.4% 24.2% 10.4%

🇵🇹 Portugal 65.4% Draw 24.2% 🇨🇩 Congo DR 10.4%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇵🇹Portugal 1.72

🇨🇩Congo DR 0.54

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.26.

39.3% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

60.7% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

35.0% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

1–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 17.2%

§ 03

Venue context

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

NRG Houston, USA

Heat index 47°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 33°C June–July daily high

Humidity 77% relative humidity

Altitude 15m 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.

1,986 Elo rating 1,661

2.07 Recent NT form 2.20

€1122M Squad value €184M

0.266 Squad form (global) 0.154

0.792 Fitness readiness 0.557

+0.75 Decoupling g −0.30

Portugal carry the Elo edge (325 points). On the decoupling axis, Portugal 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 →