South Africa v Korea Republic · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇿🇦 South Africa CAF Elo 1,518 · world 80th

20 / 31 / 49 win · draw · win most likely 0–1

🇰🇷 Korea Republic AFC Elo 1,758

Group: A
Date: Thursday 25 June 2026
Kick-off: 01:00 UTC
Venue: Monterrey Stadium, Guadalupe

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group A

South Africa v Korea Republic — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(South Africa scores k) and P(Korea Republic 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 Korea Republic favourites at 48.8%, with a 30.9% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 0–1 (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

20.3% 30.9% 48.8%

🇿🇦 South Africa 20.3% Draw 30.9% 🇰🇷 Korea Republic 48.8%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇿🇦South Africa 0.75

🇰🇷Korea Republic 1.30

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.05.

33.7% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

66.3% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

39.3% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

0–1 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 15.8%

§ 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.

1,518 Elo rating 1,758

1.73 Recent NT form 1.87

€52M Squad value €202M

0.091 Squad form (global) 0.160

0.749 Fitness readiness 0.701

−0.50 Decoupling g −0.23

Korea Republic carry the Elo edge (240 points). On the decoupling axis, Korea Republic 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 →