Panama v England · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇵🇦 Panama CONCACAF Elo 1,730 · world 32nd

5 / 16 / 79 win · draw · win most likely 0–2

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

Group: L
Date: Saturday 27 June 2026
Kick-off: 21:00 UTC
Venue: New York/New Jersey Stadium, East Rutherford

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group L

Panama v England — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Panama scores k) and P(England scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.29% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes England favourites at 78.9%, with a 15.8% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 0–2 (16.3%), 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

15.8% 78.9%

🇵🇦 Panama 5.3% Draw 15.8% 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England 78.9%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇵🇦Panama 0.48

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿England 2.35

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.83.

53.7% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

46.3% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

34.9% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

0–2 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 16.3%

§ 03

Venue context

The conditions at New York/New Jersey Stadium, East Rutherford — the same environment layer the dossiers' climate exposure draws on.

MetLife East Rutherford, USA

Heat index 31°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 28°C June–July daily high

Humidity 70% relative humidity

Altitude 9m 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.

1,730 Elo rating 2,021

1.67 Recent NT form 2.47

€38M Squad value €1878M

0.123 Squad form (global) 0.410

0.572 Fitness readiness 0.807

−0.35 Decoupling g −0.01

England carry the Elo edge (291 points). On the decoupling axis, England 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 →