Football score forecasting combines a strong statistical core with a difficult contextual edge. Dynamic Poisson-family models estimate team strength, expected goals, and coherent score probabilities, but do not directly understand roles, tactical matchups, motivation, or how a first goal changes behaviour.
arXiv:2607. 18084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting a football match before kickoff requires more than knowing past results: a model must use changing information and make a clear prediction before the answer is available.
By Zhaokai Wang, Tianlin Gui, Jiayuan Rao, Shangzhe Di, Yihong Tang, Dingli Liang
Predicting a football match before kickoff requires more than knowing past results: a model must use changing information and make a clear prediction before the answer is available. We present WorldCupArena, a dynamic benchmark for language models and deep-research agents.
arXiv:2607. 24573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support decisions about uncertain future events, yet evaluating their ability to forecast real-world outcomes remains difficult.
By Jonas Schr\"oder, Jonas Schweisthal, Oliver M\"uller, Markus Weinmann, Stefan Feuerriegel
arXiv:2608. 03416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are now regularly asked to forecast real-world events, but comparisons are often difficult because models receive different information, use different tools, and are evaluated under different rules.
By Jonaid Shianifar, Iias Faiud
arXiv:2607. 26061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-match tactical decision-making in professional football relies heavily on subjective expert analysis and identity-based scouting systems that cannot generalize to unseen teams.
By Mouad Zemzoumi, Amine Abouaomar
arXiv:2607. 17765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce WC2026-Agents, a benchmark and dataset for evaluating large language models (LLMs) as autonomous forecasting agents on real, future events.
By Jiacheng Ding, Cong Guo, Jason Xu
arXiv:2603. 15212v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating football player transfers is challenging because player actions depend strongly on tactical systems, teammates, and match context.
By Miru Hong, Minho Lee, Geonhee Jo, Hyeokje Cho, Hyunsung Kim, Pascal Bauer, Sang-Ki Ko
arXiv:2607. 14616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision--language models have become increasingly capable of interpreting visual scenes, but it remains unclear whether they can use information to make strategically effective decisions.
By Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Haotian Xia, Akshaya Bharadhwaj, Anay Putty, Anirudh Ravishankar, Jaewoong Lee, Jinglin Xiao, Kyumin Andrew Shim, Mishika Ahuja, Nisarga Patil, Leo Liu, Zhuohan Liu, Weining Shen
arXiv:2607. 11548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial football metrics such as pitch control assume access to the positions of all 22 players, yet the most widely available source of positional data -- the broadcast main camera -- shows only 10-16 of them at any moment.
By Seongjin Choi
arXiv:2607. 06495v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Live sports commentary is grounded generation under a deadline: statements concern real, named athletes, the grounding state changes every few seconds, and no reference text exists at generation time.
By Juan S. Santillana (Independent Researcher)
arXiv:2606. 11120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We recast pass evaluation in football (soccer) as a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-like evaluation problem whose components mostly exist in the literature under different names: a value model (possession value), a world model (multi-agent trajectories with ball interactions), and a policy over counterfactual actions (sampling pass variants with noise).
By Andrew Kang, Priya Narasimhan