Croatia v Ghana · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇭🇷 Croatia UEFA Elo 1,911 · world 17th

65 / 24 / 11 win · draw · win most likely 1–0

🇬🇭 Ghana CAF Elo 1,510 · world 94th

Group: L
Date: Saturday 27 June 2026
Kick-off: 21:00 UTC
Venue: Philadelphia Stadium, Philadelphia

§ 01

The scoreline grid

The ensemble's full distribution over exact scorelines — Croatia 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

Croatia v Ghana — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Croatia scores k) and P(Ghana scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.05% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Croatia favourites at 64.6%, with a 23.9% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 1–0 (15.6%), 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

64.6% 23.9% 11.5%

🇭🇷 Croatia 64.6% Draw 23.9% 🇬🇭 Ghana 11.5%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇭🇷Croatia 1.77

🇬🇭Ghana 0.61

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 2.38.

42.6% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

57.4% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

38.8% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

1–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 15.6%

§ 03

Venue context

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

Lincoln Financial Philadelphia, USA

Heat index 35°C apparent temperature (June–July)

Max temperature 30°C June–July daily high

Humidity 67% relative humidity

Altitude 13m 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.

1,911 Elo rating 1,510

2.13 Recent NT form 1.33

€370M Squad value €291M

0.334 Squad form (global) 0.187

0.844 Fitness readiness 0.689

+0.46 Decoupling g +0.34

Croatia carry the Elo edge (401 points). On the decoupling axis, Croatia 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 →