A plain-English look at the reasoning behind every number on this site — and where we're honest about its limits.
Every nation gets an attack and a defense rating built from its full competitive history, with recent matches counting for more and lopsided friendlies counting for much less. Because the World Cup is played at neutral venues, no team gets an artificial home boost.
Bare results lag reality going into a tournament of fresh rosters, so we layer in two things a scoreline alone misses: how good each side's recent chance quality has actually been, and the club-level quality of the players in the squad. Together these sharpen the ratings beyond what the win-loss record shows.
Those ratings produce a full picture of how a given match is likely to unfold — which feeds every market on the site in one internally-consistent shot: match result, Over/Under, Both Teams To Score, handicaps, corners, cards, scorers and more.
We play out the entire 2026 World Cup tens of thousands of times — all 12 groups, the best third-placed teams, and the full knockout bracket — to produce advance, win-group, reach-final and title odds. A measure of uncertainty is added to every run because the new 48-team format is genuinely high-variance.
A probability is only meaningful next to the price. Across the site we show our number alongside the best available market price so you can see exactly where the two disagree — and decide for yourself. We don't sell picks; we show our work on the outcomes and let the comparison speak.