New Zealand v Belgium · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇳🇿 New Zealand OFC Elo 1,562 · world 62nd

7 / 17 / 76 win · draw · win most likely 0–2

🇧🇪 Belgium UEFA Elo 1,893 · world 18th

Group: G
Date: Saturday 27 June 2026
Kick-off: 03:00 UTC
Venue: BC Place Vancouver, Vancouver

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group G

New Zealand v Belgium — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(New Zealand scores k) and P(Belgium scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.24% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Belgium favourites at 75.5%, with a 17.4% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 0–2 (15.1%), but no exact score clears 15% — 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

17.4% 75.5%

🇳🇿 New Zealand 7.1% Draw 17.4% 🇧🇪 Belgium 75.5%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇳🇿New Zealand 0.57

🇧🇪Belgium 2.27

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.84.

53.9% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

46.1% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

39.4% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

0–2 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 15.1%

§ 03

Venue context

The conditions at BC Place Vancouver, Vancouver — the same environment layer the dossiers' climate exposure draws on.

BC Place Vancouver, Canada

Heat index 21°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 21°C June–July daily high

Humidity 74% relative humidity

Altitude 11m 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.

1,562 Elo rating 1,893

1.07 Recent NT form 2.07

€28M Squad value €613M

0.127 Squad form (global) 0.173

0.690 Fitness readiness 0.718

+0.01 Decoupling g +0.29

Belgium carry the Elo edge (331 points). On the decoupling axis, Belgium 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 →