Full
time.
Ballon p’Oor followed the 2026 World Cup knockouts with live scores, the bracket and win probabilities from POOR, our football model. The tournament is over, so the site is resting until the next one.
The record
POOR never picked winners. It gave each team a percentage chance, so this is scored on the side it rated more likely, with a draw called when the two sides were within 10 points of each other.
Four of the eight knockout misses went to penalties, and the semi-final between France and Spain was rated a coin flip.
- 65%Germany out on penalties to Paraguay
- 54%Netherlands out on penalties to Morocco
- 64%Australia out on penalties to Egypt
- 62%Colombia out on penalties to Switzerland
- 68%Brazil beaten by Norway
- 55%Mexico beaten by England
- 50%France beaten by Spain in the semi-final
- 59%France beaten by England for third place
What it was
Ballon p’Oor was a companion site for the World Cup knockouts. It had live scores and win probabilities updating every 15 seconds during play, plus the full bracket, goals, lineups, match stats and match previews.
POOR stands for Pairwise Opponent Outcome Rating. It’s also what you’d be if you tried to make money with it.
How POOR works
Every international since 1872
The model starts from a results history of nearly 50,000 men’s international matches, from the first ever international in 1872 to the 2026 final. A live match feed added scores, goals, lineups and statistics during the tournament.
Ratings that only know the past
POOR replays that history in order through an Elo-style rating engine. Each result moves the two teams’ ratings against each other, and how far they move is tuned separately for each type of competition. The rating a team takes into a match uses only results from before kick-off.
From a rating gap to a probability
A statistical model turns the gap between two ratings into chances of a win, draw or loss over 90 minutes, and folds in extra time and penalties for knockout ties. Before going live, it was tested on decades of results it had never seen and had to beat simple baselines in every period.
Back for the
Asian Cup
The site returns for the 2027 AFC Asian Cup in Saudi Arabia, with live scores, the bracket and POOR’s forecasts for all 51 matches.