EA Sports FC has correctly predicted the FIFA World Cup winner for the fifth time in a row

EA has continued its lengthy streak of correctly predicting who will win the FIFA Men’s World Cup.

The publisher may no longer have the official FIFA licence, but last month it continued its tradition of predicting who would win the tournament.

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.

A few days before the opening match started last month, EA posted an image on the official EA Sports FC account on X, declaring that Spain would win the trophy for the second time in its history (the last time being back in 2010).

Sure enough, on Sunday night Spain defeated Argentina 1-0 after an extra time goal by Ferran Torres, denying Argentina’s Lionel Messi his second World Cup winner’s medal.

Numerous companies had been drumming up publicity by engaging with World Cup content, including predictions. What made EA’s claim particularly interesting, however, was that it had already 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 would win it again this year has now extended the streak to 16 years.

“We called it. You played it. Spain made it a reality,” the official EA Sports FC account tweeted on Sunday. “Five predictions in a row, and Spain lifted the trophy 11M+ times across EA Sports FC 26 and EA Sports FC Mobile. Congratulations on your second star.”

EA has had 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 solely on the final game.

While EA no longer has the World Cup licence, it still used the occasion to release an update for EA Sports FC 26 called The World’s Game, which includes an International Tournament mode with the same group stages as the real-life tournament, as well as newly licensed international teams.

FIFA’s own official World Cup game was released as a Netflix streaming exclusive. VGC’s one-star review called it “a woefully undercooked companion to the world’s biggest tournament”.