Forecasting the FIFA World Cup 2026 with Large Language Models: A Benchmark of Reasoning, Web-Augmented, Agentic, and Open-Weight AI Systems

Abstract

Large language models are increasingly used for tasks that require prediction, interpretation, and decision support, yet their behavior in complex sports forecasting is still not well understood. This study evaluates how different large language models perform in predicting the FIFA World Cup 2026 under several forecasting settings. The benchmark covers three levels of tournament prediction: the group stage, the knockout stage, and the final outcome of the competition. The evaluation includes proprietary models, cloud hosted models, and open weight models, tested with standard prompting, reasoning-based inference, web search support, and agent-based forecasting workflows. The analysis goes beyond simple winner prediction and examines structural validity, qualification accuracy, hallucination rate, consistency, forecast plausibility, and agreement with mainstream football expectations. The results indicate that access to current external information has the strongest effect on forecasting reliability. In the OpenAI-based experiments, web supported agent configurations increased structural validity from 58.50 to 90.87 and reduced hallucinations by 78.7 percent. A similar improvement was observed in the Ollama and cloud model group, where web access increased validity from 53.39 to 97.04 and reduced hallucinations by 75.7 percent. Reasoning improved the internal logic of several forecasts, but when it was used without external grounding, it sometimes produced confident but unsupported predictions. These findings suggest that reasoning alone is not sufficient for tournament forecasting when the task depends on current squads, recent performance, injuries, rankings, and evolving football context. The best results were achieved when models combined structured reasoning with access to up to date information. Overall, this study provides a reproducible evaluation framework for large language model-based sports forecasting and shows how grounding, reasoning, and model design influence prediction quality in a complex international tournament setting.