EA may no longer have the official FIFA World Cup licence, but it’s continuing its tradition of predicting who will win the tournament.
The company posted an image on the official EA Sports FC account on X, showing who it has predicted will win the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, which starts later this week.
As in previous years, EA ran simulations of every match in the group stages, followed by simulations of the knockout rounds generated by these predictions.
After doing this, it has concluded that Spain will win the trophy for the second time in its history (the last time being back in 2010).
Everyone has been making predictions on who would win the World Cup, so it would be understandable to dismiss EA’s claim as an attempt to get extra publicity, especially during a tournament it no longer has the official licence for.
What makes EA’s claim particularly interesting, however, is that it has accurately predicted the last four World Cup winners in a row.
In 2022, the publisher accurately predicted that Argentina would win the World Cup for the first time since 1986. In 2018, it correctly identified that France would win the tournament, while in 2014 it declared that Germany would win, which it promptly did.
It also correctly guessed in 2010 that Spain would win the World Cup for the first time in its history, meaning its prediction that it will win it again has a lot riding on it, because should it be wrong it’ll end a lengthy streak.
EA has less success when predicting the winners of other major sports tournaments. The publisher has predicted the last 15 Super Bowls using its Madden games, and has only got eight of them right.
It did, however, get Super Bowl 49 correct to a surprisingly accurate degree, by not only choosing the right winner but also perfectly predicting the score, as the New England Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks 28-24 just like EA said they would.
It’s been notably less impressive when accurately predicting the winners of the NHL Stanley Cup, something it’s failed to do for the past 14 years in a row. As with the FIFA World Cup, though, this often involved choosing a winner before the season had even started, whereas its Super Bowl predictions were based on the single final match.
While EA no longer has the World Cup licence, it’s still used the occasion to release an update for EA Sports FC 26 called The World’s Game.
The update includes an International Tournament mode, with the same group stages as the real-life tournament, as well as newly licensed international teams.
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