SLEEPING GIGANTE?
Are World Cup traders overlooking the defending champs? PLUS: The Norway paradox, bracket path dependency, and U.S. home cooking
The World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world, reaching more than 5 billion people during the 2022 tournament. And 2026 promises to be the biggest yet, at least in terms of scope. After a quarter-century of World Cups containing 32 teams in eight groups and a 16-team knockout round, this year’s tournament field has expanded to a whopping 48 teams spread across 12 groups, leading into a new 32-team knockout structure, with the whole thing playing out across Canada, Mexico and the U.S. for more than a month.
Looking at the Polymarket futures, we see some familiar World Cup themes mixed in with some new twists: Europe is still the sport’s center of gravity. The top expected goalscorers are the usual suspects. The co-hosts are getting some attention — though maybe less than we’d expect. And because the expanded group-stage format makes survival easier and bracket seeding more complicated, the most interesting market questions may not be who gets through, but who earns a comparatively clear path once the knockout rounds begin. So as we approach opening kickoff on June 11, here’s what traders know — or think they know — about the biggest World Cup ever.
The favorites are priced a tier above the rest — should they be?
Although there isn’t any single overwhelming favorite to win the most coveted prize in world soccer — no team is above 20%, unlike some recent World Cup cycles — there are two teams that the market places above all the rest: France (18%) and Spain (17%). Winners of two of the past four World Cups, Les Bleus and La Roja have combined 35% odds to win the championship, and they each carry roughly double the odds of any other team in the field aside from third-ranked England (11%).
Does that check out? Certainly, Spain and France look like the strongest national teams in the world on paper if we plot out all of the 2026 contenders along two axes — their World Football Elo Rating (which measures how well they’ve been playing in recent matches) and the total estimated transfer value of all the players on their roster — as compared with their market odds:
But the numbers are not without some interesting wrinkles as well. England, for instance, has a higher roster value than any other team in the field, though its Elo lags behind the market favorites. On the other side of things, Argentina — the defending champ, by the way — is actually No. 2 in the world Elo ratings, but their roster quality lags behind those of France and Spain. Still, La Selección might be getting undervalued — they’re at least as close to the favorites in our chart as Portugal and Brazil, who have slightly higher title odds.
Further down the chart, a few teams are positioned better than their odds suggest. Colombia, Ecuador and Croatia all rate well by Elo — higher than several teams with similar or better market odds — while Turkey, Senegal, Uruguay and Switzerland sit in a dangerous tier where the raw title probability is low but the résumé is as good as teams with higher odds. None of them is being priced as a true championship threat, which, fair enough: winning seven matches in a 48-team World Cup is a tall order. But if we’re looking for teams whose market odds may be underselling their ability to bust the bracket, the middle cluster of the chart is a good place to start.
Related: The market LOVES Europe.
As mentioned above, the defending champion is Argentina. But when Lionel Messi and company won in 2022, it broke a streak of titles for European nations that spanned four World Cups and two decades, dating back to Brazil’s most recent title in 2002.
After South American teams won seven times in 12 cycles from 1950-1994, Europe has now won five of the past seven World Cups. And traders don’t see that changing anytime soon. In our chart of likely champions above, each of the Top 3 entries (France, Spain, England) hailed from Europe, as did eight of the Top 10 — Brazil and Argentina being the only exceptions. (This makes sense, as Uruguay is the only other South American squad to ever win the Cup, and it last happened in 1950.)
In the winning team continent polymarket, traders think there’s a 71% chance a European team will win this year, followed by South America all the way down at 23%:
Maybe the more interesting part involves non-European or South American winners. Famously, the tournament has never been won by a continent aside from those two, but it is being held in North America this year for the first time since 1994.
Typically, host nations get a sizable boost — almost always reaching the knockout stage — and that effect wasn’t even diluted the last time multiple hosts shared the World Cup (with Japan and South Korea in 2002). So what does that mean for America, Mexico and Canada?
Each has at least an 83% chance to advance from the groups, which would be a pretty good result for each by their usual standards. The U.S. also ranks much higher in the odds (14th) than their Elo (41st) would seem to warrant, though they also have more valuable talent than we’d expect. Home-cooking aside, North America sits at just 2% to win the World Cup anyway — lower than either Africa (led by Senegal and Morocco) or Asia (Japan).
The group stage is less deadly now…
One of the consequences — and we can’t say it was “unintended” — of expanding both the number of total World Cup entries, and the number of groups, is that it makes life a lot easier for the favorites early in the tournament.
With 48 teams split into 12 groups of four apiece, the Top 2 teams from every group will advance — as well as the eight best third-place finishers across all the different groups. (Under the previous format, only the top two teams from each group moved on.) While you’d still prefer not to sweat out being in third place, the pressure to be in the top half of your group, so vital in creating tension during earlier formats, is no longer as much of a factor anymore.
And for the juggernaut teams, the danger is now less about going home early and more about what kind of path through the bracket your seeding sets up. The dilution of groups has contributed to a 77% chance the eventual champion goes unbeaten in the tournament. And in the market odds to advance, we can see that nine teams are all but assured to make the knockouts already (with 91-100% odds), 10 more teams are solidly in the next bucket (81-90%), and overall there are 32 teams — two-thirds of the field — with at least a 61% chance to make the knockouts.
Based on the odds to win the group and/or advance, we can sort each group favorite into “safety net” tiers. The x-axis in the chart below shows how likely the favorite is to simply win its group; the y-axis shows how likely that same team is to advance anyway if it doesn’t win the group. So the farther right a team is, the more control it has over the group; the higher it is, the more room for error it has if something goes wrong.
France is the best example of the 2026 format’s new safety-net dynamic: It is not the single most likely group winner, but if it slips up, the market still gives it a very strong chance (90%) to survive anyway. Spain, Argentina and England are more straightforward cases — heavy favorites to win their groups outright. Brazil, Germany, Belgium and Portugal are a little less secure at the top, though still insulated from too much danger by the expanded format if they wind up needing the back-door. The U.S., meanwhile, sits in the true danger zone: It is only a modest favorite to win Group D, and it also has the weakest conditional safety net of any group favorite on the board. (Mexico isn’t too far from that predicament, either… so much for home advantage!)
Long story short, the new format gives favorites more ways to reach the knockouts. No longer will an off-day potentially derail a promising tournament, even if your odds still depend some on the group you were drawn into.
…But bracket paths matter more.
The other massive side-effect from the expanded field (and expanded knockouts) is that your placement within the bracket suddenly takes on greater importance. If the groups are easier to survive than before, then instead of the old “Groups of Death”, teams might instead have paths of death.
Take, for instance, Argentina. Theoretically, winning Group J should be a good thing — the bracket structure keeps the Group J winner away from another group-winner until at least the quarterfinals. But based on the market odds, their reward could still be drawing dangerous Uruguay — an 88% advancement team despite being in the same group with Spain — in the Round of 32. Or consider Brazil, whose 76% favorite status to win Group C might merely mean a first-round knockout date with Group F projected runner-up Japan, who made the Round of 16 in three of the previous four World Cups.
Including those, here are the group favorites who have the most certain-to-advance opponents potentially waiting in the wings as runners-up in the Round of 32 to face at the start of their knockout journey:
The opposite of that involves the eight group winners who are slotted to face third-place teams in the first round of the knockouts. If things go chalk and the favorites win, that group includes: Germany (Group E), France (Group I), Mexico (Group A), England (Group L), the USA (Group D), Belgium (Group G), Switzerland (Group B) and Portugal (Group K). This isn’t to say those teams are automatically in great shape — the third-place slots could unexpectedly offer a difficult opponent, and the bracket is designed to have them face another team in the same situation the following round (should they win).
But they do represent a softer immediate landing in the knockout rounds than other teams have to face, and in a tournament where every little edge helps and the group-stage incentives have shifted under the new format, where you land in the bracket might matter as much as who you were in a group with.
In the market for a Golden Boot
So far, we’ve been focusing on the team markets, which help tell us who’s situated best to make their way through the chaos and lift the World Cup trophy in July. But another set of interesting markets involves players — including who’ll win the Golden Boot for most goals scored, who’ll have the most assists and who’ll have the most combined goal contributions (goals + assists). Those markets are partly about individual ability, obviously. But they’re also not-so-secretly about your country’s path — it’s a lot easier to win the scoring race if your team is playing six or seven matches instead of just three or four.
England’s Harry Kane and France’s Kylian Mbappé sit in a tier of their own because their teams have the second- and third-best chances to make the final, which should give them plenty of chances. Spain has the highest odds to make the final of all, but the market is banking on their scoring being more diluted. Meanwhile, Messi and especially Norway’s Erling Haaland don’t have as much of a Golden Boot chance because their team’s run might be more limited than Kane’s or Mbappé’s. (Although, if Argentina is actually underrated per our Elo chart earlier, Messi could be a big value play.) But at the same time, Haaland’s odds are much higher than we would expect from Norway’s advancement probability.
We can also see these effects at play in the “nation of top goal-scorer” market. The multiplier between Norway’s Golden Boot odds (16%) and finals odds (6%), 2.67x, is the highest of any realistic contender in the field. Other teams with premiums include France (1.32x for Mbappé plus roster depth), England (1.25x for Kane), Portugal (1.22x for Ronaldo and Rafael Leão) and Argentina (1.09x slight premium for Messi and Julian Álvarez). Meanwhile, Germany only has a 0.73x multiplier because they lack as many obvious go-to scorers.
All told, these player markets really scratch the itch of trying to balance multiple, semi-correlated probabilities at once. The Golden Boot winner (and his team) need a combination of several ingredients — elite finishing talent, team potential and a clear enough path to let the goals pile up. And that brings us back to the broader lesson of the 2026 World Cup markets: The expanded tournament is bigger, but it’s also more path-dependent. The favorites have more chances to survive longer, but more things can also happen, for more teams, in more weird ways than ever before. So with the probabilities set, all that’s left is to kick things off and see where the chaos takes us.
Neil Paine is the proprietor of Neil’s Substack, a newsletter that looks at all sports through the lenses of both analytics and storytelling. He is also a freelance writer for a variety of outlets — and before that, he was the sports editor at FiveThirtyEight and an analytics consultant for the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks.
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