⚽🤖 Using AI to predict the World Cup winner

Plus: Sports as cultural exchange, and the history of Haiti’s uniforms (Issue #433)

Base image from Anefo on Wikimedia Commons.

“Tomorrow afternoon, around twenty people will gather in my living room to watch Australia play in the World Cup,” Dan Foster recently wrote in Backyard Church. “Some will wear green and gold. We’ll cheer the same goals, complain about the same referees, and experience the same emotional rollercoaster that accompanies supporting a national team in a major tournament.”

The World Cup, he writes, is a tournament that brings a nation together and fills a greater need for human connection. It’s the same instinct that has driven the growth of religion and civilization.

“Alone, a human being was vulnerable,” he writes. “Together, humans became one of the most successful species on the planet.”

In this issue, let’s come together and support our community — Medium writers — and see how they are processing the World Cup.

For a month, millions like me will believe impossible things. That’s the real magic of the World Cup.

— Malky McEwan in E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower, What Americans Don’t Know About the World’s Greatest Tournament

The great cultural exchange

As World Cup tourists start making their way to North American institutions like the local deli counter, Buc-ee’s, and Texas Roadhouse, Americans have been embracing them in return — including some writers, like Dan Fredman, on Medium.

This great cultural exchange is actually the point of the World Cup and other sporting events like it. Medium writer Dr. Lauren Tucker likes to liken them to a “giant family reunion” for people around the world. But, she writes in Reframing Democracy: The World Cup Reminds Me Why I Still Love America, there’s something different about this year’s tournament:

When America hosts a World Cup match, something remarkable happens. American fans arrive wearing jerseys from Mexico, Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Argentina, South Korea, Morocco, England, and dozens of other countries.

The world, in all its diversity, is already at home in the U.S.; the World Cup makes that diversity visible. This isn’t a repudiation or contradiction of Foster’s argument about identity and team sports. Just the opposite, she argues: “This is American identity.”

It’s an especially striking contrast now, in 2026, when “fear merchants” and nativists have made deporting immigrants the foundation of their governing platform. For Tucker, seeing a U.S. team full of players with diverse last names, or seeing the celebrations from the people who make the United States home, has been reassuring.

“I see Americans celebrating differences that some politicians insist should divide us,” Tucker writes. “Most importantly, I see proof that the American experiment still works.”

Sports and nationalism have been connected since the beginning of the nationalist era in the 19th century. International sports competitions like the Olympics and World Cup were established, in part, to steer nationalist impulses in a positive direction.

— George Dillard, Bad Nationalism vs. Good Nationalism

Wearing pride on your kit

Community manager Kassandra @ Medium has been following Haiti’s first performance in the Cup since 1974. It’s been an exciting, prideful time for Haitians around the world, but as she writes, not a time without its indignities.

A few weeks ago, FIFA officially banned Haiti from using their jerseys in the World Cup:

Why? Because a corner of the jersey depicted the Battle of Vertières, the final battle of the Haitian Revolution, where Haiti won their independence. Saeta, the kit manufacturer, argued that the jerseys were meant to demonstrate “the pride, resilience and spirit of the Haitian people.”

Haitians fully embrace their revolutionary history, Kassandra writes, but “the first successful Black revolution is still too dangerous to commemorate on a jersey.” It’s not even the first time this has happened to a Haitian sports team this year — the Haitian Winter Olympics team was forced to cover a portrait of General Toussaint L’Ouverture.

“But here’s the thing about Haitians,” she writes, “we’ve never needed permission to be proud.”

Predicting the winner?

Can you build a model that will predict the winner of the World Cup? One that isn’t an octopus, that is (RIP Paul the Octopus). It’s been a recent trend among football fans and programmers to see who can build a model that will give the most accurate results, and several writers on Medium have built their own attempts.

In Can Machine Learning predict the World Cup Winner?, writer Stephanie Hohenberg competitively tested two models before determining a winning model, and a winning team, Argentina. Victor Adams used Monte Carlo simulation to add probabilities to his model, which eventually pointed to a winner among “France, Spain and Argentina, with England not too far behind.” Sander Lam is going to try to beat the office betting pool by vibecoding a model onDatabricks. The result of his 20,000 simulations? The final will be “Spain 1–1 Argentina, Argentina on penalties.”

But before you start making bets, it might be good to keep the reason Hohenberg loves the World Cup so much in mind: its unpredictability. As she writes, “Underdogs emerge, favourites collapse, and every tournament produces surprises about how far a team can really go.”

A final thought

Ahead of this upcoming Juneteenth in the U.S., educator TheHonestInfluencHER writes in Juneteenth Is the Lesson America Still Has to Keep Learning about what she wants her students to take away from the holiday’s history. Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived at Galveston Harbor in Texas and informed the last remaining enslaved population in the United States about the Emancipation Proclamation more than 2 years after it had been signed.

“But the history is not just about the date,” she writes. “It is about the delay.”

Juneteenth asks us to sit with a difficult truth: freedom was not simply announced and complete. It had to be heard. It had to be claimed. It had to be protected. It had to be lived into, even in a country still struggling to honor the full humanity of Black people.

And even now, it still has to be taught.

Are you following the World Cup? See what everyone is writing about, and contribute your own stories, under the World Cup tag!

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Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

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