The objective of this challenge is to build a model that predicts:

1. The total number of goals each team will score during the FIFA World Cup 2026.
2. The stage at which each team will finish the tournament.

You are provided with a tabular dataset containing historical team-level records from FIFA Men's World Cup tournaments from the Fjelstul World Cup Database. Using this historical data, your task is to predict the performance of each country participating in the FIFA World Cup 2026.

This is a closed-data challenge. Participants may use only the Fjelstul World Cup Database before the start of the 2026 World Cup. External datasets, pre-computed ratings, betting odds, web-scraped data, or any other third-party data sources are not permitted. Participants are encouraged to derive additional features, statistics, and insights from the provided data, but all modelling inputs must originate from the challenge dataset.

The dataset is sourced from the Fjelstul World Cup Database by Joshua C. Fjelstul, Ph.D. (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0): https://github.com/jfjelstul/worldcup

Note:

• Penalty shoot-out goals are not included in the target.