EA Sports predicts World Cup winner 5 times in a row after Spain win

Jul 20, 2026 - 16:15

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EA Sports predicts World Cup winner 5 times in a row after Spain win

Published Jul 20, 2026, 7:07 AM EDT

Spain win means EA Sports simulations continue their unerring run

Before every recent World Cup, EA has run a simulation of the entire tournament in its annual soccer game series to predict the winner. The publisher may have lost the official FIFA license, but that hasn't made its predictions any less accurate. It has now accurately predicted the winner of five consecutive World Cups.

Spain's 1-0 victory over Argentina on Sunday, earning the country its second World Cup trophy, means that EA's flawless World Cup prediction record now goes back 16 years. In 2010, EA's simulation predicted that Spain would win for the first time. In 2014, 2018, and 2022, the publisher correctly called it for Germany, France, and Argentina respectively.

EA predicted Spain's win a few days before the start of the tournament, on June 6. It was the first World Cup prediction made after EA severed its relationship with the international football body FIFA, which runs the World Cup, and began publishing its annual series of games under the name EA Sports FC. Latest entry EA Sports FC 26 includes an unlicensed international tournament mode called The World's Game featuring all the national teams and players from the real World Cup.

FIFA's officially licensed rival this year was FIFA World Cup, a casual game streamed over Netflix using smartphones as controllers.

EA's prediction engine works by drawing on its vast trove of data on individual player attributes and team performance, and running AI simulations of each game in the tournament, from the group stages through to the knockout rounds. EA runs similar predictions on other sports represented in its stable, including the Super Bowl in the Madden games and the Stanley Cup in the NHL series, but for some reason these are much less accurate.