France v Iraq · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇫🇷 France UEFA Elo 2,062 · world 3rd

78 / 17 / 5 win · draw · win most likely 2–0

🇮🇶 Iraq AFC Elo 1,618 · world 56th

Group: I
Date: Monday 22 June 2026
Kick-off: 21:00 UTC
Venue: Philadelphia Stadium, Philadelphia

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group I

France v Iraq — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(France scores k) and P(Iraq scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.22% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes France favourites at 78.2%, with a 16.6% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 2–0 (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

78.2% 16.6%

🇫🇷 France 78.2% Draw 16.6% 🇮🇶 Iraq 5.2%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇫🇷France 2.24

🇮🇶Iraq 0.44

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.68.

50.1% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

49.9% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

32.3% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

2–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 17.2%

§ 03

Venue context

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

Lincoln Financial Philadelphia, USA

Heat index 35°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 30°C June–July daily high

Humidity 67% relative humidity

Altitude 13m 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.

2,062 Elo rating 1,618

2.13 Recent NT form 2.00

€1609M Squad value €23M

0.384 Squad form (global) 0.095

0.886 Fitness readiness 0.458

+0.24 Decoupling g −0.55

France carry the Elo edge (444 points). On the decoupling axis, France 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 →