Côte d'Ivoire v Ecuador · Oxford Football Forecasting

🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire CAF Elo 1,695

21 / 34 / 45 win · draw · win most likely 0–0

🇪🇨 Ecuador CONMEBOL Elo 1,938 · world 8th

Group: E
Date: Sunday 14 June 2026
Kick-off: 23:00 UTC
Venue: Philadelphia Stadium, Philadelphia

§ 01

The scoreline grid

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

Fig. V7 Ensemble · Group E

Côte d'Ivoire v Ecuador — scoreline probabilities

Cells show P(exact scoreline); the right column and bottom row are the marginal totals P(Côte d'Ivoire scores k) and P(Ecuador scores k). Grid runs 0–7 goals per side; the 8–10-goal tail holds 0.00% of the mass and is omitted from the cells (not from the totals).

The grid makes Ecuador favourites at 44.9%, with a 33.6% draw. The single most-likely scoreline is 0–0 (17.2%), 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

21.5% 33.6% 44.9%

🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire 21.5% Draw 33.6% 🇪🇨 Ecuador 44.9%

Rounded values sum to exactly 100%.

Expected goals (λ)

🇨🇮Côte d'Ivoire 0.70

🇪🇨Ecuador 1.13

Poisson means feeding the grid; combined expected goals 1.83.

27.7% Over 2.5 goals P(3 or more goals in the match)

72.3% Under 2.5 goals complement of over-2.5

35.0% Both teams to score P(each side scores ≥ 1)

0–0 Most-likely scoreline modal exact score · 17.2%

§ 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.

1,695 Elo rating 1,938

2.20 Recent NT form 1.80

€397M Squad value €290M

0.221 Squad form (global) 0.158

0.695 Fitness readiness 0.710

+0.24 Decoupling g −0.55

Ecuador carry the Elo edge (243 points). On the decoupling axis, Côte d'Ivoire 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 →