Every team arrived with a pre-tournament Elo rating — a form line built from years of results. Rank the four teams in a group by Elo, and you get an expected order before a ball is kicked. Chalk it up on the board, then compare it to how the group actually finished, and the gap between the two lines tells you who overperformed and who fell short.
Of the 48 teams across all 12 groups, finished in exactly the spot the board predicted. The rest moved — some up, some down.
Chalkboard · 01
The tactics board
Every group, chalked up as a coach would draw it: each line runs from a team's Elo-expected finish to where it actually landed. A line climbing right is a team that beat its billing; a line dropping right fell short. Watch for the two circled sides — they climbed further than anyone else.
Dotted rail = neutral reference. Gold = overperformed. Red chalk = underperformed.
The board tells you who moved. It doesn't tell you how the matches actually felt on the pitch. For that, flip to the scoreboard — every result from every group, logged match by match.
Scoreboard · 02
Every result, ranked by closeness
All 72 group-stage matches, grouped and sorted tightest group first. Red tickets were nail-biters; green tickets were routs.
Group by group
Every group's final table, with each team's Elo-expected finish for reference. Click a group to expand its match results.
The final whistle
Note: this dataset is a generated/simulated FIFA World Cup 2026 dataset (per its source), not an official FIFA feed — treat figures as illustrative. "Expected rank" is Elo-based only and doesn't account for group difficulty, injuries, or in-tournament form swings.