USA v Australia · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇺🇸 USA CONCACAF Elo 1,726

39 / 29 / 32 win · draw · win most likely 1–1

🇦🇺 Australia AFC Elo 1,777 · world 24th

Group: D
Date: Friday 19 June 2026
Kick-off: 19:00 UTC
Venue: Seattle Stadium, Seattle

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group D

USA v Australia — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(USA scores k) and P(Australia 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 USA favourites at 38.6%, with a 29.1% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 1–1 (13.9%), but no exact score clears 14% — 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

38.6% 29.1% 32.3%

🇺🇸 USA 38.6% Draw 29.1% 🇦🇺 Australia 32.3%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇺🇸USA 1.31

🇦🇺Australia 1.17

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.48.

45.1% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

54.9% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

51.4% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

1–1 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 13.9%

§ 03

Venue context

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

Lumen Seattle, USA

Heat index 23°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 23°C June–July daily high

Humidity 69% relative humidity

Altitude 14m 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.

1,726 Elo rating 1,777

1.73 Recent NT form 1.93

€452M Squad value €55M

0.236 Squad form (global) 0.087

0.805 Fitness readiness 0.616

+0.43 Decoupling g −0.72

Australia carry the Elo edge (51 points). On the decoupling axis, USA 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 →