Senegal v Iraq · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇸🇳 Senegal CAF Elo 1,867 · world 22nd

58 / 27 / 15 win · draw · win most likely 1–0

🇮🇶 Iraq AFC Elo 1,618 · world 56th

Group: I
Date: Friday 26 June 2026
Kick-off: 19:00 UTC
Venue: Toronto Stadium, Toronto

§ 01

The scoreline grid

The ensemble's full distribution over exact scorelines — Senegal 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

Senegal v Iraq — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Senegal scores k) and P(Iraq scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.02% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Senegal favourites at 57.8%, with a 27.6% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 1–0 (16.7%), 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

57.8% 27.6% 14.6%

🇸🇳 Senegal 57.8% Draw 27.6% 🇮🇶 Iraq 14.6%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇸🇳Senegal 1.52

🇮🇶Iraq 0.64

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.16.

36.7% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

63.3% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

37.8% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

1–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 16.7%

§ 03

Venue context

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

BMO Field Toronto, Canada

Heat index 25°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 25°C June–July daily high

Humidity 71% relative humidity

Altitude 81m 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.

1,867 Elo rating 1,618

2.27 Recent NT form 2.00

€360M Squad value €23M

0.218 Squad form (global) 0.095

0.712 Fitness readiness 0.458

−0.26 Decoupling g −0.55

Senegal carry the Elo edge (249 points). On the decoupling axis, Senegal 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 →