fabioricardo7

Thanks for your question. It's Monte Carlo, so individual simulated tournaments produce all sorts of champions, Argentina wins ~28% of the 100k iterations. What's stable is the aggregate: Argentina and Spain consistently come out as the two highest-probability teams, and that barely moves across different seeds.

I appreciate everyone's feedback. This is a preprint, and I was looking exactly for this kind of constructive scrutiny to help improve the work. The data is limited, and I'm well aware of that. I just thought this would be a good first step, with encouraging results (and, after today's match, accurate ones too).

Hahaha, as a Brazilian, this hurts. But as a man of science, I can't argue with the numbers. Congratulations, hermano.

That was exactly the point I was trying to make in this preprint. I appreciate your comment.

Maybe in an alternate reality. Jokes aside, discovering the right weights to match the current fixture, along with the limited data available, were the key challenges in forecasting at such an early stage.