Czechia v South Africa · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇨🇿 Czechia UEFA Elo 1,740

51 / 29 / 20 win · draw · win most likely 1–0

🇿🇦 South Africa CAF Elo 1,518 · world 80th

Group: A
Date: Thursday 18 June 2026
Kick-off: 16:00 UTC
Venue: Atlanta Stadium, Atlanta

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group A

Czechia v South Africa — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Czechia scores k) and P(South Africa 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 Czechia favourites at 51.1%, with a 29.2% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 1–0 (14.7%), 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

51.1% 29.2% 19.7%

🇨🇿 Czechia 51.1% Draw 29.2% 🇿🇦 South Africa 19.7%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇨🇿Czechia 1.41

🇿🇦South Africa 0.78

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.19.

37.6% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

62.4% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

42.0% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

1–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 14.7%

§ 03

Venue context

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

Mercedes-Benz Atlanta, USA

Heat index 37°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 31°C June–July daily high

Humidity 73% relative humidity

Altitude 313m 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.

1,740 Elo rating 1,518

2.07 Recent NT form 1.73

€225M Squad value €52M

0.268 Squad form (global) 0.091

0.779 Fitness readiness 0.749

+0.06 Decoupling g −0.50

Czechia carry the Elo edge (222 points). On the decoupling axis, Czechia 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 →