Spain v Saudi Arabia · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇪🇸 Spain UEFA Elo 2,155 · world 1st

86 / 11 / 3 win · draw · win most likely 2–0

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia AFC Elo 1,569 · world 75th

Group: H
Date: Sunday 21 June 2026
Kick-off: 16:00 UTC
Venue: Atlanta Stadium, Atlanta

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group H

Spain v Saudi Arabia — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Spain scores k) and P(Saudi Arabia scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.76% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Spain favourites at 85.7%, with a 11.2% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 2–0 (15.8%), but no exact score clears 16% — 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

85.7% 11.2%

🇪🇸 Spain 85.7% Draw 11.2% 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia 3.1%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇪🇸Spain 2.78

🇸🇦Saudi Arabia 0.42

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 3.20.

61.9% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

38.1% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

32.4% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

2–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 15.8%

§ 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.

2,155 Elo rating 1,569

2.20 Recent NT form 1.53

€1580M Squad value €38M

0.309 Squad form (global) 0.090

0.841 Fitness readiness 0.679

−0.18 Decoupling g −0.34

Spain carry the Elo edge (586 points). On the decoupling axis, Spain 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 →