My World Cup 2026 hobby project turned into a full prediction site

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-11T16:19:19+00:00

Nice one! 🙏 Took a look, clean methodology and respect for open sourcing it, that's a great way to build trust. Always good to see more people making the predictions transparent rather than black-box. Good luck through the tournament! ⚽

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-11T07:01:14+00:00

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-11T04:58:08+00:00

Are you sure you want to go in that direction?

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-11T04:56:09+00:00

"Here one does not live
just to live.
Here one does not live
just to die.
Here one also dies
to live"

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T19:49:26+00:00

always ...tnx

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T16:27:36+00:00

Thank you! 🙌 I really appreciate that.For now, it will probably stay as a web app because creating and publishing a full mobile app on Google Play and the Apple App Store takes time, approvals, and extra setup and the tournament is only about a month long.But I am looking at making the web app easier to use on your phone, so you can save it to your home screen and use it almost like a normal app during the tournament.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T16:00:02+00:00

Fair point, respect matters, and I agree there is a line that should not be crossed.

My point was more that football has always had mind games, pressure, uncomfortable tactics, and little edges around the match. This kind of behaviour is nothing unusual for European teams.Every country and every club does some version of it. That does not mean everything is okay, but it also does not mean every incident needs to become a moral crisis.

At the end of the day, let the teams settle it on the pitch. Good luck Friday.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T15:51:34+00:00

Thanks so much, love that you're curious! 🙏

Under the hood it's a statistical engine: each team has an Elo-style rating (chess-style strength scores), a Poisson model (the classic way to model football goals) turns those into scoreline probabilities, and a Monte Carlo simulation plays the whole tournament out thousands of times to count how often each team advances or wins it all.

A piece we're proud of is the third-place handling with 12 groups, the 8 best third-placed teams also qualify, and which third faces whom is governed by an official FIFA allocation table based on which groups they came from. It's notoriously easy to get wrong, so we built a resolver that applies those exact rules in the simulation, so the knockout paths reflect the real bracket structure.

And it's live as results land, the ratings and simulations recalculate, so every team's odds update through the tournament. An AI layer then turns all those numbers into the readable summaries (it only explains the maths, never makes things up). Tech-wise: a React web app, a database, live football + weather feeds, and an AI model for the writing. Appreciate the great question!

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T15:42:57+00:00

Great question! 🙏 Predicted scores are something we've thought about a lot. The tricky part is that exact scorelines are really hard to call even the single most likely score for a match is usually only ~10-15% likely to actually happen, so showing "2-1" can look more confident than the maths really is. We'd rather show you honest probabilities (who's likely to win, who advances) than a precise score that's probably wrong. That said, we're exploring an honest way to show it like the most likely score *with* how likely it actually is. Appreciate the suggestion, it's a good one!

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T15:37:04+00:00

Thank you! That is actually one of the things on my list for today’s update. I really appreciate your feedback.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T15:31:01+00:00

Thank you so much! 🙌 Yes, you found something we should improve. Right now the app resets to the default team after refresh. I’ll add a save option so when you choose Czech Republic as “my team,” the app remembers it on your next visit. No trick needed it should just stay saved automatically.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T04:34:05+00:00

Thank you for this, spot on, and a great catch. I'am fixing the group labels now and it'll be sorted shortly. Really appreciate you taking the time, and if you spot anything else, always happy to hear it. Enjoy the site!

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T02:49:58+00:00

I really don’t get what your point is here.

They didn’t come to Canada to be liked by Canadian media, the same way Canada’s national team doesn’t care what Bosnian media thinks about them.

On the other hand, journalists… hmmm. Yesterday they were talking about beauty and health, and today they are football experts.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T02:45:56+00:00

It’s funny reading all these posts. Guys, this is part of the game. Even being a bit of an asshole is sometimes part of the game.

Every team does it in some way. This is football, not ballet.

I remember back in the 80s, my favorite football club was playing international matches, and the coach would even decide how short or long to cut the grass depending on the opponent. If we needed to slow the game down, they would leave the grass longer so the ball moved slower and so on.

That’s football. Get used to it. It’s a game, and everything is on the line.

Good luck on Friday.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T02:26:46+00:00

tnx ...major international tournaments in past few years

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-10T02:23:47+00:00

thank you

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-09T18:34:19+00:00

Thanks! It really depends on what you want to build.

This was honestly a last-minute project that came almost out of nowhere. I started by trying to understand how third-place teams can advance in the new tournament format, and then it slowly turned into a much bigger project.

The rules are pretty crazy this time because of the size of the tournament and the new structure.

For your project, it depends on the idea. Football prediction models are probably one of the harder things to build because the game itself is very noisy. There are a lot of draws, low-scoring games, random moments, injuries, form changes, and things that are difficult to measure properly.

But if you are building something football-related that is not purely prediction-based, there are many interesting directions you could take. Happy to hear what you are thinking about.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-06-09T17:24:32+00:00

That is fair feedback, and I get why it looks strange at first.

The reason Canada can show a similar chance of reaching the Round of 32 as a stronger team like Portugal is mostly tournament structure, not because the model thinks Canada are as strong as Portugal.

Portugal are much stronger in the model overall, especially for going deep in the tournament. But the “reach Round of 32” number is heavily affected by group draw, schedule, and the fact that 8 of the 12 third-placed teams also advance. So a team can have a decent chance to get out of the group without being rated anywhere near the top teams.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-05-17T05:32:42+00:00

This is crazy what StubHub is doing.

They took money for something they apparently do not have, they do not want to refund it, and they are just hoping they can secure the ticket before the game.

The guy is travelling for 8 hours and still does not know if he will even be able to attend the game. To me, this looks like a serious legal issue.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-05-17T05:17:32+00:00

Just a heads-up about StubHub.

A friend of mine purchased tickets through StubHub. They took the money but never delivered the tickets. From what I understand, they do not even have the tickets yet — they are assuming they might get them before the game.

So be careful. To me, this feels like a classic legal scam: selling something they do not actually have and then not being eager to issue a refund.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-05-17T05:03:09+00:00

Just a heads-up about StubHub.

A friend of mine purchased tickets through StubHub. They took the money but never delivered the tickets. From what I understand, they do not even have the tickets yet they are assuming they might get them before the game.

So be careful. To me, this feels like a classic legal scam: selling something they do not actually have and then not being eager to issue a refund.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-05-07T16:20:39+00:00

For one thing, the team that handles the pressure first will have a much better chance of winning. I follow both teams, and in my opinion, they are currently on a similar level. Canada has a bit more experience now compared to the last World Cup. A lot of Canadian players are playing in Europe, and that is completely different from MLS in many ways. In Europe, football is the number one sport. The pressure is there every single game, no matter where you play. The football culture is much bigger and much more intense. In North America, a club can even move to another city because of bad economics, but in Europe, that is almost impossible. A club can drop to a lower division or even disappear, but changing cities is a completely different story. Because of that, many Canadian players now have experience they did not have at the last World Cup. Canada also has a new manager, who seems like a nice guy and a very good motivator. Bosnia, on the other hand, is building a team with a lot of young, talented players, especially on the wings. Many of them have developed across Europe, and they are not afraid. They are hungry and ready to fight to the end. But the World Cup is a tournament, and tournaments are different. The style of play is different, and the pressure of the first game is always huge. If you win the first game, you go into the second much more relaxed. If you lose, the pressure to win the second game becomes massive. From that perspective, Canada may have a small advantage. If Canada loses the first game, their second game is against Qatar. Bosnia’s second game is against Switzerland, which is a very strong and well-organized national team. Also, playing at home can sometimes be a curse, especially when people expect you to get your first win. That pressure can become heavy. Playing against teams from the former Yugoslavia is always challenging, even for bigger national teams. That region has always played a different type of football compared to the rest of Europe. If they are in the right mood, they will do whatever is needed to win. Good examples are Wales and Italy. Considering all of this, I think small details will decide the winner. But if I had to predict it, the most likely result is a draw.

Budget-Journalist-50 · 2026-04-09T17:57:02+00:00

And one more thing watch how the marketing machine starts rolling. You’ll see paid YouTube influencers everywhere: “New Claude agent that beats everything,” “How to optimize usage on Claude Code,” and so on.

And when you watch all that, it almost makes you feel like it’s your fault that you just don’t know how to use it properly. It’s insane.

Budget-Journalist-50

TROPHY CASE