{"id":694090,"date":"2026-06-09T19:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T19:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/694090\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T19:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T19:32:11","slug":"whats-your-teams-path-to-the-world-cup-title","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/694090\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s your team\u2019s path to the World Cup title?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Argentina won the 2022 World Cup, and they\u2019re one of the favorites again, at least according to our model. Getty Images.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re reading this while it\u2019s super fresh in your inbox, I\u2019ll be doing a Substack Live with Galen Druke<\/a> today (Tuesday) at 2:30 p.m. to discuss what life in New York is like when the Knicks are good \u2026 and the Maine Democratic primary, which is being held tonight. Come join us in the Substack App, or we\u2019ll post a video of the conversation later.<\/p>\n

This newsletter aims to cover a lot of bases. We\u2019re aware there\u2019s a lot <\/a>of political news<\/a> and sports news<\/a>. We\u2019re working overtime to cover these beats; I\u2019m not sure we\u2019ve ever published so much in such a compressed time period before.<\/p>\n

And life can be wonderful in early June, especially if you live in a temperate city like New York. So we\u2019re also aware that even the substantial number of sports fans on the Silver Bulletin mailing list are not necessarily grappling with the fact that the World Cup will begin on Thursday. The opening games are in Mexico; the United States\u2019s first match is set for Friday night in Los Angeles. (See here<\/a> for a more detailed outlook on the U.S.\u2019s prospects.)<\/p>\n

However, I did want to give you one more pitch for our World Cup predictions<\/a>. We\u2019ll update these projections every day throughout the tournament. But today\u2019s newsletter provides some bonus World Cup content inspired by reader suggestions. I\u2019ll take advantage of our model to answer two common questions:<\/p>\n

What is each country\u2019s most likely path to the World Cup title?<\/p>\n

And if you\u2019re thinking of watching or even attending a match, which group-stage games will have the greatest impact on the eventual outcome of the tournament? And might be most worth buying tickets for?<\/p>\n

With a 32-team knockout-stage bracket in place for the first time ever, there\u2019s basically no avoiding that your favorite soccer team will eventually have to defeat some tough opponents. To be honest, the group stage is rather forgiving, with two-thirds of teams set to advance into the \u201cplayoffs\u201d. However, our simulations suggest that group-stage slots are far from equal. There actually is an advantage in most cases to winning your group. And although the top 8 of 12 third-place finishers will also advance \u2014 this World Cup format is practically giving out participation trophies \u2014 these paths are generally pernicious, yielding tougher R32 and R16 opponents.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s one fun way to look at the group stage. Conditional upon finishing first or second in the group, or qualifying from the 3rd-place slot, what are your team\u2019s most likely opponents in every subsequent round? And what are its odds of taking home the FIFA World Cup Trophy?<\/p>\n

This is one of those times when I\u2019m going to show you the data first and explain it later. As a warning in case you\u2019re a fan of Uzbekistan or something, I\u2019ve restricted the outlook to the top 30 among the 48 teams. This basically covers everyone, including co-hosts Mexico, Canada and the United States. But the bottom 18 teams are so unlikely to win that the simulation results are mostly statistical noise, even though we ran 200K simulations today instead of our usual 100K.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Argentina won the 2022 World Cup, and they\u2019re one of the favorites again, at least according to our…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":694091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-694090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/694091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}