England v Ghana · Oxford Football Forecasting

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England UEFA Elo 2,021 · world 4th

75 / 19 / 6 win · draw · win most likely 2–0

🇬🇭 Ghana CAF Elo 1,510 · world 94th

Group: L
Date: Tuesday 23 June 2026
Kick-off: 20:00 UTC
Venue: Boston Stadium, Foxborough

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group L

England v Ghana — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(England scores k) and P(Ghana scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.12% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes England favourites at 74.5%, with a 19.1% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 2–0 (17.4%), 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

74.5% 19.1%

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England 74.5% Draw 19.1% 🇬🇭 Ghana 6.4%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿England 2.03

🇬🇭Ghana 0.44

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.47.

44.8% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

55.2% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

31.6% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

2–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 17.4%

§ 03

Venue context

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

Gillette Foxborough, USA

Heat index 29°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 27°C June–July daily high

Humidity 74% relative humidity

Altitude 83m 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.

2,021 Elo rating 1,510

2.47 Recent NT form 1.33

€1878M Squad value €291M

0.410 Squad form (global) 0.187

0.807 Fitness readiness 0.689

−0.01 Decoupling g +0.34

England carry the Elo edge (511 points). On the decoupling axis, Ghana 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 →