FT Alphaville’s AI Prediction World Cup

The World Cup has started. Normally, that’s not something we would care much about (as a blog at least). But with England, Norway and Scotland all qualifying, Alphaville Towers is abuzz.

To fill space mark the occasion of the 2026 World Cup in a vaguely Alphaville-y way, we decided to see which AI chatbot could come up with the best predictions for all 72 of the group games, and slap them all into a Google Sheet for you all to check out.

We’ve also added the predictions spat out by Goldman Sachs’ souped-up statistical model, along with our own entirely artisanal guesses — albeit only for today’s matches onwards.

However, don’t worry, we collected all the forecasts of Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT (models 3.5, 4.6 and 5.5, respectively) before the World Cup actually started. We’ll keep our Google Sheet updated throughout the competition — and give anyone who wants viewer access — but below is the full list of predictions.

As you can see, Goldman has come out of the gate strongly by nailing the scoreline of the opening game between Mexico and South Africa, and is now in the lead thanks to the Belgium-Egypt and Saudi Arabia-Uruguay games.

Claude and Gemini have both guessed two scorelines correctly, but the most impressive prediction so far is arguably Gemini foreseeing the 1-1 result between Brazil and Morocco. ChatGPT has so far only called one scoreline, which is admittedly one better than AV’s brains trust and our more *cough* qualitative guesses.

Unsurprisingly, no one guessed that Cabo Verde would hold Spain to a 0-0 draw. But at least we’re not this guy:

For what it’s worth, Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT all think Spain will win in the end. Other interesting takeaways (and yes, we’re using the term “interesting” loosely here):

— Goldman’s model bloody loves 1-1 draws, predicting no less than 38 such results, out of 72 group games. In fact, it predicts that every single game in Groups D and F will end 1-1.

— Claude is the most optimistic in terms of goals scored (though having watched the Germany—Curacao game, Alphaville thinks it may be too sober in some cases).

— Goldman Sachs also believes in goals. Or rather, an absence of clean sheets. Of the 72 group games, it only sees seven games where one of the side fails to score.

— Bryce has zero faith in Scotland, expecting them to lose to Morocco and get brutalised by Brazil. In contrast, he reckons Norway will beat France by 3-0. Meanwhile, Toby is seemingly bidding for a lifetime of Further Reading duty by predicting only a narrow Norway win versus Iraq, a draw against Senegal and a loss to France. The FTAV team’s predictions for England’s opener against Croatia on Wednesday are for either a win, a loss, or a draw, so someone’s going to be right.

— There are sadly no obvious and silly hallucinations from our three chatbots, like Italy actually making it to the World Cup. Fun fact, the last World Cup knock-out game that Italy played was the final they won in 2006. Materazzi seems to have jinxed Italy by getting Zidane sent off in that game.