Klement's World Cup Forecast Model: A Perfect Record

Paul the Octopus needed only a tank, a flag and a herring to become a World Cup phenomenon. Joachim Klement needed data, models and a sense of mischief – and has ended up with something far more dangerous: a perfect record.

The German economist, now based in the UK, has built a forecasting model that has correctly picked the last three World Cup winners. Germany in 2014. France in 2018. Argentina in 2022. Three tournaments, three calls, no misses.

Now the numbers point to the Netherlands. If Virgil van Dijk lifts the trophy in July, Klement’s statistical prophecy will stretch to four out of four.

A model that mocks prediction – and keeps being right

Klement never set out to become football’s answer to an oracle. Quite the opposite. He wanted to expose the arrogance of people like him.

“This started as an exercise in showing the world a hubris of economists who think they can forecast stuff that they actually have no clue about,” he says. The plan was simple: build a serious-looking model, let it fall flat, and use the failure as a cautionary tale.

Instead, his “cautionary tale” keeps cashing in.

After Germany’s triumph in 2014 matched his first projection, he assumed a repeat in 2018 would reveal the whole thing as a fluke. The algorithm spat out France. They won. He tried again in 2022. Out came Argentina. Lionel Messi did the rest.

“Because I was right three times in a row, people now think that this model is unbeatable and that I obviously will have to be right as well next time,” he says, half amused, half resigned.

Numbers, nations and the 50% nobody controls

Klement’s model is not mysticism. It leans on what he calls “systemic” factors: population size, national wealth, climate, Fifa world rankings – the broad structural forces that tilt the field before a ball is kicked.

Those inputs feed a complex forecast that doesn’t just pick a winner; it sketches the shape of the entire 48-team tournament. It has Japan stunning Brazil in the second round. It has Scotland falling at the group stage. It sends England deep, but not all the way.

According to the projections, Gareth Southgate’s side will reach the semi-finals before running into a familiar wall. Portugal are tipped to knock them out, echoing that 2006 heartbreak, though the model doesn’t go as far as scripting another penalty shootout.

The Dutch, though, are the ones who emerge on top. If they do, Klement’s perfect streak survives. If they don’t, the myth goes with them.

For all the structure behind the spreadsheet, Klement insists that half of what decides a World Cup lies beyond any model.

“The other 50% is luck,” he says. A deflection. A referee’s call. A shot that clips the post instead of nestling inside it. Two elite teams, level in quality, separated by a moment that nobody can see coming.

“Things like that are completely unpredictable.”

A distraction in a grim year

Klement is a strategist at investment bank Panmure Liberum, not a professional tipster. The World Cup project is his side pursuit, a quadrennial escape from a world he describes as weighed down by crises and wars.

Each time the tournament looms into view, he runs the numbers again. The forecast has become a cult read, growing in popularity with every correct champion. It is, he hopes, a small piece of light relief.

“In particular in 2026, when there are so many crises, wars and things going on, it is something that makes me feel good and hopefully the readers feel good and gives them a little bit of a distraction from all the kind of bad stuff that is going on in the world,” he says.

The irony is that the more he warns people not to take it too seriously, the more seriously they seem to take it.

Office bets and Dutch nerves

Inside his own office, the model has become a talking point – and a source of pressure. Colleagues now quiz him not just on macroeconomics but on micro details: how does an ACL injury to Dutch and Tottenham midfielder Xavi Simons affect the Dutch probability curve? What does one missing playmaker do to a carefully balanced equation?

The questions keep coming. So do the bets.

“I’ve got several colleagues who bet some money on the Netherlands in response to me publishing that note,” Klement admits.

He has spent a decade in the UK and calls himself a “pessimist”. That streak is showing now. The more people pile in behind his orange-tinted forecast, the more he braces for the moment it all unravels.

“If the Netherlands get eliminated from the World Cup,” he says, “I think the next day I have to work from home.”

For an economist trying to prove that prediction is folly, nothing would make the point quite as sharply as logging in from his kitchen while a nation of disappointed punters asks where the numbers went wrong.