A team of statisticians from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, led by professor Achim Zeileis, built an artificial intelligence model that reproduces the entire tournament over and over again, following the official FIFA schedule, extra time, and penalty shootouts. The result of running it 100,000 times yields something concrete: Spain is the national team with the best chance of lifting the trophy, with a 14.5% probability, followed closely by England and France, both at 12.4%, and Germany at 11.2%.
What stands out is that Argentina and Portugal appear further back than many would expect: the world champions reach 8.2% and the Portuguese 8.9%. Why so low? The researchers themselves explain it: the new 48-team format and more knockout rounds spread the chances among more national teams, reducing the historical advantages of the traditional powers.
The model does not guess: it processes national team matches from the last eight years, bookmakers’ odds, Transfermarkt market values, the FIFA ranking, and even each country’s GDP per capita. All of that feeds a “random forest” system, a technique that combines thousands of decision trees trained on data from the 2006 World Cup onward. As the authors say, it is like rolling loaded dice: each team has different probabilities of scoring depending on its level and its opponent.