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Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

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Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#31

Post by bArray »

I've updated the magic weights, and I too can get the result I want:

    WEIGHTS = {
      'w_xg': 0.09,
      'w_goals': -0.07,
      'w_star': 0.018,
      'w_value': 0.18,
      'w_rank': 0.4,
      'w_def': -0.12,
      'xga_share': 0.85,
      'w_gk': 0.0042
    }

    $ python3 worldcup_model.py --sims 100000

    2026 FIFA World Cup -- championship probabilities (100,000 simulations, from Round of 32)

     1. England                 11.7% *
     2. France                  10.0% *
     3. Spain                    9.3% *
     4. Argentina                8.4%
     5. Germany                  8.1%
It's coming home!

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#32

Post by toyg »

amazingamazing wrote: post #25

Why is the world cup so infrequent anyway? I assume to match olympics? Good models need a lot of data. Can you really be accurate with what, 30 data points, in which the team composition is basically reset each time?

World Cups have to alternate with continental competitions (Copa America, Asian Cup, European Cup, Africa Cup of Nations) which are on similar cycles. They could technically be held every two years (and current FIFA leadership is pushing towards that), but federations and clubs are resistant (because every summer tournament places even more stress on an already-long club season, and it would likely devalue other competitions).

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#34

Post by toyg »

sigbottle wrote: post #30
hn937758 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clubs want their star players focused on club championships, and the star players make their real money playing on their club teams.

do world cup athletes get a big bonus for world cup participation from their govts and/or FIFA?

FIFA pays federations on a result basis. It's then up to the individual federations to redistribute that money as you see fit. As you can imagine, a lot of that does not end up in the athletes' pockets... I believe clubs get some (low) compensation for injuries, but it's also common knowledge that players who play deep into summer will end up performing poorly the following season.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#35

Post by notahacker »

mcphage wrote: post #12
dmurray wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The abstract does say > limitations, principally the small number of tournaments available for validation and the risk of in-sample weight selection But I agree this model is no more valuable than Paul the Octopus.

That almost makes it worse—like they're vaguely aware that training too heavily on too small a data set makes badly trained models, but are unaware that it has a name and is an actual identified problem.

They've even described how they overfitted it! For five world cups, a simple model based on ranking and goal difference in the group stages[1] predicted it four times, so they invented a somewhat subjective variable on defensive strength to cover the teams that didn't score much...

[1]yes, both of those are endogenous variables...

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#36

Post by otherme123 »

sigbottle wrote: post #30
hn937758 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clubs want their star players focused on club championships, and the star players make their real money playing on their club teams.

do world cup athletes get a big bonus for world cup participation from their govts and/or FIFA?

It is up to their respective Football Federation (Spain: RFEF, England: FA, Germany: DFB, etc.), but FIFA pays each Federation a bonus: https://intereconomia.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image-2...

In the average country players agree the bonus conditions with their Federation.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#38

Post by notahacker »

jacknews wrote: post #23
yardie wrote: post #15

Does the model account for the blatant favouritism in the refs? We used to laugh about it before but as the cameras have gotten better it has become a lot more visible. And in this case, is turning the tournament into a bit of a joke. -- Egypt was robbed.

The FIFA-planned game schedule is also surprising. Argentina have not had to face a single 'big' contender through the tournament, until now.

It's not at all surprising: the seeded the winners and the three highest ranked teams to make it impossible for them to meet until this stage if they won their group in the group stage, with the group stage having its own seeding system to make it very winnable for them.

They also missed a potentially tricky first knockout round tie against local rivals Uruguay because Uruguay underperformed and Cape Verde unexpectedly overperformed.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#39

Post by anamax »

killingtime74 wrote: post #5

"They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time, it works every time." - Brian Fantana, Anchorman

One of the founders of Renaissance Technologies, which runs some of the most successful quant funds of all time, said ""We’re right 50.75% of the time... but we’re 100% right 50.75% of the time."

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#40

Post by jonwinstanley »

toyg wrote: post #32
amazingamazing wrote: post #25

Why is the world cup so infrequent anyway? I assume to match olympics? Good models need a lot of data. Can you really be accurate with what, 30 data points, in which the team composition is basically reset each time?

World Cups have to alternate with continental competitions (Copa America, Asian Cup, European Cup, Africa Cup of Nations) which are on similar cycles. They could technically be held every two years (and current FIFA leadership is pushing towards that), but federations and clubs are resistant (because every summer tournament places even more stress on an already-long club season, and it would likely devalue other comp…

Every 4 years is good. Makes it a special event
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