Supercomputer and AI continue to predict Spain will win the 2026 World Cup
Among famous supercomputers, Opta demonstrated a system that still worked correctly until the final match. Right before the 2026 World Cup started, this supercomputer rated Spain as the strongest candidate, with a 16.1% chance of winning, followed by France (13%), England (11.2%), and Argentina (10.4%).
Spain and Argentina have entered the final, scheduled to take place at 2:00 a.m. on July 20 (Hanoi time), and England just beat France 6-4 in the third place match this morning.
According to Opta, Spain has a 59% chance of lifting the championship trophy in New Jersey, while Argentina has a 41% chance. TNT Sport evaluates that the two are not much different, especially when they are both undefeated on the way to the tournament final.
At the 2026 World Cup, Opta performs up to 10,000 simulations per match. Through analyzing the results of each scenario, the supercomputer determines how often each team advances to different rounds or wins the championship, then converts it into probability.
According to the Observer, when receiving a question about Spain being rated as a championship candidate by supercomputer Opta before the tournament, FIFA President Gianni Infantino smiled and replied: "Yes, if Opta says so, then so be it."
Similarly, PELE, the new football model of the famous data analysis blog FiveThirtyEight (USA), also thinks that Spain will win with a rate of 55%. The model performed about 100,000 simulations before producing results.
However, FiveThirtyEight analyst Nate Silver emphasized that a 10% gap that is too low can appear unexpectedly as the match progresses. "If we had to pick a team, our model leans slightly towards Spain, but the gap between them is small enough that a moment of brilliance or a mistake in the final could decide who owns the gold cup," Silver wrote on the blog.
The supercomputer of the University of Liverpool Management School (ULMS) of the University of Liverpool (UK) predicts that the 2026 FIFA World Cup final will be a confrontation between England and Spain before the qualifying round takes place.
ULMS has not yet commented on the upcoming final. However, in the news on the website on June 12 before the semi-finals (June 15), this supercomputer continued to think that Spain would win the championship. The system runs about 1,000 simulations before producing a prediction.
With famous AI chatbots, most also lean towards Spain, including OpenAI ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen, Google Gemini, SpaceXAI Grok. Meanwhile, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI and Anthropic Claude support Lionel Messi's team.