How the numbers are built, the gate outcomes, and the timestamped, hashed record of every prediction locked before its result was known.
Every squad is frozen at kick-off — its market value, its top-flight minutes, its Elo. The model asks one question: how far should a squad of this quality have gone? The gap between that expectation and reality is the whole site. No form, no vibes, no narrative — just what the squad was, versus what it did. Because money inflates, raw values are never compared across eras: every value figure is a share of that tournament's total, so a 2002 euro and a 2026 euro carry the same weight.
sha256: 60310d7f6d5c7aa5b44adb0405182a5067a7212b4be0c131c804bb06c97f3cf2 — timestamped publicly before kickoffsha256: f8c3b05db3fe2a78e91a44bc5b3d0bd8a3834de7e1f4bd31a50eab55b2d32942sha256: 1661d931a27818ce032c01695cf14f90831ce4a76eaa3768279f52d0e311c285sha256: 8e9077128f6a08af5153c5c15f89f7a32d4cffb12a8cde6523410078c4ee0cf2sha256: 4e857a9037e559a843030b3cde404e078e55d2a1a2ee4b2ba9adcad390323c33sha256: 89f106227c2dd40c29be98d1f84da1119f66e9c9aec68344c4d181420754a03esha256: d97dac6f71371a5d2ca89a0578f317bd5f26e9d5b2b57b9fb29f8036430d6000| Metric | Definition |
|---|---|
| top-5 apps / goals / assists / minutes | Career totals in the big-five first divisions (Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1) only — no cups, no Europe, no second tiers — frozen at the opening-match cutoff. Assists are unreliable on Transfermarkt before ~2006 and shown n/a there. |
| value_share | A squad's Transfermarkt value as a share of all squads' value that tournament. The inflation control — raw euros are never compared across eras. |
| value coverage | Players in the squad with a Transfermarkt value at the cutoff. 2002 predates TM values (appearance metrics only). |
| Champions League apps / goals | Career UEFA Champions League proper (excludes qualifying), frozen at cutoff. |
| cohort_share | Share of the squad's top-5 minutes held by its modal four-year birth window — how bunched a generation is. |
| succession | Under-23 squad value ÷ total squad value — the share of a squad's Transfermarkt market value carried by players under 23 at the opening-match cutoff. Bounded 0–1; below 0.05 flags a generational cliff. 2002 has no Transfermarkt values. |
| outlast_pct | Share of the field a team outlasted (handles 32- vs 48-team formats). |
| over_under | Actual outlast_pct − Elo-baseline expected (10k sims through the real draw, host +100). 95% bootstrap CI. |
| upset_index | −log₂ of the model's probability of the observed result. Matches below the model's resolution floor (4.1%) are shown ≥4.61. |
| squad completeness ◑ | Matched players ÷ squad size. A short squad understates value — flagged wherever value is shown. |
| Topic | Note |
|---|---|
| What this is | Squad quality is frozen at each tournament's opening-match cutoff and compared to the result. Expected finish is an Elo-only Monte-Carlo baseline (10k sims through the real draw, host +100); a squad-augmented model follows after the 2026 final. Descriptive, not betting advice. |
| Squad coverage | 5,728/5,759 roster slots (99.5%) are matched to a real Transfermarkt player; 31 are imputed placeholders (squad-minimum value, zero appearance metrics) so short squads don't understate value. Every squad carries exactly its named-squad size. 99 players were recovered by a club-at-cutoff cross-check where Transfermarkt and Wikipedia disagreed on a date of birth. |
| Points convention (tables) | The tables use the FIFA all-time-table convention: 3 points a win, 1 a draw, across every match. A penalty shootout counts as a draw (teams level after 120'); an extra-time result counts as a win/loss. Shootout-decided knockouts are identifiable in the data as level-score knockout matches. |
| Unofficial World Championship | The lineal-title data is the RSSSF list (James Allnutt, Paul Crankshaw, Jostein Nygård, Roberto Di Maggio), parsed into a separate table — never mixed into our match model. Its World-Cup rows (2002–2026) were cross-validated score-for-score against our matches (24/24 agree) and its title lineage recomputed from first principles (0 mismatches). |
| Paper Index | A squad's accumulated pedigree at kick-off as one number (/best-squads). Five components — squad value share, and top-5 league & Champions League appearances and goals, per player — each z-scored within its own tournament (mean 0, sd 1 across that year's squads); the composite is the mean of the available z's. Within-tournament normalization exists for the same reason value_share does: raw euros and raw appearance counts are not comparable across eras, so we score each squad against its own field. Excluded: assists (shown as a column only — unreliable pre-2006, and a missing component would penalise early squads); 2002 market values (no TM data — those squads score on the four appearance components, flagged ◑). Imputed players count as zeros. Limitation: it measures accumulated pedigree and market esteem at kickoff, not current form — career totals reward age, so a veteran-laden squad scores high regardless of trajectory. |
| Model probability | Every page quotes the same outcome-based quantity:
upset_index = −log₂ P(observed 90-minute result), where the win/draw/loss probability comes
from the Elo→Poisson model. The match-page pre-match trio sums to 100.0% at one decimal and reproduces the
stored P (a build gate checks all 484). It is outcome-based, not scoreline-based. |
| Shock ledger | On /shocks: cumulative upset index dealt and received per nation. Only matches where the lower-Elo side won or drew count; that match's index credits the underdog as dealt and the favourite as received. A favourite winning (even a blowout) is a different phenomenon and is excluded — this ledger measures giant-killing, not dominance. |
| Expected-vs-actual scatter | Eliminated 2026 dots use a provisional 48-team Monte-Carlo expected finish (in-progress tournament, knockout draw randomised); they are excluded from the official over/under leaderboards until the final. All 2002–2022 dots are the settled 32-team baseline. |
| Data sources | Elo: eloratings.net (dated, pre-tournament). Squads & results: Wikipedia. Player values & appearances: Transfermarkt. World Bank for per-capita context. |
| Match line-ups & scorers | Parsed from Wikipedia match footballboxes for every tournament 2002–2026: starting XIs + substitutes (on/off minutes from the substitution-arrow icons), scorers with minutes, and penalty/own-goal flags. Each XI is gated (11 starters + exactly 1 GK per side, sub-minute consistency, and each team's scorer count equal to its goals); players join our roster by Wikipedia wikilink slug, with any unresolved names queued, never guessed. 2026 is in progress — ties not yet played (the remaining semi-final, final and third-place match) show a "not yet played" note and fill in automatically. |
| Winning goal (Drama Index) | In a decided match, the winning goal is the winner's (L+1)-th goal in chronological order, where L is the loser's final total — the goal that put the winner permanently past everything the loser managed. Goals order by base minute then added time (45+2' before 46'); scorelines include extra time, so shootout matches (level after 120') have no winning goal. Own goals count for the benefiting team. A build gate replays every covered match's goals and requires the reconstructed score to equal the stored scoreline. |