Ahead of the World Cup starting this week, EA has locked in its prediction for the winning team; something it has consistently been correct about.
It may not have the FIFA licence anymore, but that doesn’t mean EA can’t use its annual football video game to predict who will win this year’s World Cup.
This has been a longstanding tradition for the company, where it runs all the matches through whatever its most recent football game is – in this case, EA Sports FC 26 – to determine how the tournament will play out.
The 2026 World Cup is scheduled to start this week on Thursday, June 11 across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and EA has publicly predicted that the ultimate winner will be… Scotland. No wait, Spain!
This would make it Spain’s second World Cup win since 2010, when it defeated the Netherlands by 1-0, but what makes this prediction worth paying attention to is that EA’s simulations have been consistently accurate.
They’ve not been perfect, with some of the finer details turning out differently, but it’s correctly predicted the winner four times in a row, including Spain’s first victory.
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In 2022, it said Argentina would take home the trophy and though it incorrectly said it would face Brazil in the finals, its claim that Lionel Messi and Emiliano Martinez would win the Golden Ball and Golden Glove awards, respectively, was spot on.
As such, there’s a very good chance Spain will come out on top and maintain EA’s streak. Although it’s not a very risky prediction as many people fancy their chances this year.
EA hasn’t gone into any further detail on how it thinks the World Cup will play out, but its website is allowing fans to submit their own predictions. We imagine a lot of people would still vote for Spain to win although other favourites include France, England, and Argentina.
The event also coincides with an update to EA Sports FC 26 called The World’s Game, which includes a new tournament mode that launched over the weekend.
It’s essentially EA’s way of incorporating the World Cup without using the license, which it lost access to when its longstanding arrangement with FIFA ended in 2021, making FIFA 23 the final entry to bear the name.
FIFA, meanwhile, has pursued new partnerships to release officially branded video games. One of them is a Netflix exclusive game that will launch on June 11 when the World Cup starts.
The other is a free-to-play arcade style game featuring team mascots called FIFA Heroes, which launches on June 22 for mobile devices and PC but is scheduled for consoles at a later date.
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