For the 2026 World Cup, the Bond Vigilantes team have designed a predictor model, combining economic fundamentals with official FIFA rankings to help forecast how the World Cup will play out.

Each day we will look at some of the most interesting games, and provide not only a predicted outcome from our model, but also some interesting (non-football-related) talking points from our usual bloggers, plus a few guests across the broader fixed income team.

Report back each day to see the latest predictions and country write-ups from our bond specialists.

The modelThe model

For those here for the model, below we have shared the formulae and rationale for the output.

The model is a 50/50 blend between a normalised FIFA points score, and a normalised economic metric score. Depending on the relative strength of the scores, an expected goals number is produced to predict the result of the game.

After several million runs of code, we have tweaked our economic model to produce the following output, based on population, real GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, policy rates, and finally, government debt-to-GDP ratios:

Econ Model:  (LOG10(Pop)-6)^1.2 × (1+GDP/8) × 1/(1+Infl/8) × (1-Unemp) × 1/(1+Rate/20) × 1/(0.8+Debt÷GDP/5)

The rationale for the inclusion of the above metrics follows.

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