Tunisia v Japan · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇹🇳 Tunisia CAF Elo 1,628 · world 60th

14 / 29 / 57 win · draw · win most likely 0–1

🇯🇵 Japan AFC Elo 1,906 · world 11th

Group: F
Date: Sunday 21 June 2026
Kick-off: 04:00 UTC
Venue: Monterrey Stadium, Guadalupe

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group F

Tunisia v Japan — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Tunisia scores k) and P(Japan 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 Japan favourites at 57.2%, with a 28.7% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 0–1 (18.3%), but no exact score clears 18% — 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

14.1% 28.7% 57.2%

🇹🇳 Tunisia 14.1% Draw 28.7% 🇯🇵 Japan 57.2%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇹🇳Tunisia 0.58

🇯🇵Japan 1.43

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.01.

32.7% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

67.3% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

34.4% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

0–1 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 18.3%

§ 03

Venue context

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

BBVA Guadalupe, Mexico

Heat index 44°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 34°C June–July daily high

Humidity 64% relative humidity

Altitude 493m 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.

1,628 Elo rating 1,906

1.40 Recent NT form 2.20

€88M Squad value €384M

0.109 Squad form (global) 0.208

0.612 Fitness readiness 0.753

+0.21 Decoupling g −0.19

Japan carry the Elo edge (278 points). On the decoupling axis, Tunisia 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 →