Supercomputer predicts most likely 2026 World Cup winners, but how high do England rank?
Could we see a surprise in the tournament in North America next summer?
A supercomputer has made Spain the favourites to win the 2026 World Cup finals in North America next summer.
Spain won the Euros in 2024, beating England 2-1 in the final, and were last crowned World champions back in 2010 after a 1-0 extra time win over the Netherlands.
Boasting talents like Lamine Yamal, Nico Williams, Pedri and Martin Zubimendi, it’s easy to see why they’re now being ranked as one of the main teams to watch next summer, with big names like France and England close behind.
See below for the calculations put together by Opta’s supercomputer, which gives Spain a 17% chance of taking home the trophy…
It will be interesting to see how this ends up affecting the kind of odds given out by UK bookmakers and others as we get closer to the tournament, but it’s certainly easy to imagine that most will take into account useful data like this and make Spain their favourites as well.
England ranked third - can they cause an upset?
England being in third place at the moment seems about right, with the Three Lions arguably just a little bit behind the kind of quality Spain and France have in their teams.
Perhaps most importantly, though, both of those sides are full of players who’ve recently won big tournaments, with Spain winning the Euros less than two years ago while the likes of Kylian Mbappe, Ousmane Dembele, N’Golo Kante and others are still around from that 2018 World Cup-winning France side.
England have plenty of quality, particularly in attack with in-form stars like Harry Kane, Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka, Jude Bellingham, and Cole Palmer, but it also remains a squad full of players who’ve mostly under-achieved at the big tournaments.
England made it to the semi-finals of the 2018 World Cup, lost the final of Euro 2020 on penalties, went out in the quarter-finals of the 2022 World Cup, and then lost the Euro 2024 final to Spain, though of course these tournaments were all under previous manager Gareth Southgate.
Thomas Tuchel is in charge now and will have been brought in to help England make that final step in major tournaments, with the experienced German tactician previously showing he can win the big trophies, such as the Champions League with Chelsea and the Bundesliga with Bayern Munich.
Who are the dark horses for the World Cup?
The usual suspects like Argentina, Germany and Brazil rank pretty high on Opta’s list, but could it also be worth keeping an eye on the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal and Erling Haaland’s Norway for first-time winners of the game’s biggest prize?
It’s often the case that one big team will under-achieve and exit the competition early (see France in 2002 and Spain in 2014), so that could pave the way for an outsider to storm ahead.
This will most likely be Ronaldo’s last major tournament, so he’ll be extra motivated to finally fire Portugal to glory on the world stage, having inspired them to success at Euro 2016.
Haaland’s crazy form during qualifiers also shows he’s the real deal on the international stage, even if the rest of the Norway squad isn’t exactly what you’d call world class. Still, they have a few other big names like Martin Odegaard and Alexander Sorloth in there, and they won all eight of their qualifying matches, topping their group.
Uruguay and Belgium are ranked just below them and could also be decent outside bets to at least make it far in the tournament. Who are you backing? Let us know in the comments!