The Closing Report

Where it started: all twelve groups

The final tables as the group stage closed. Winners and runners-up advanced directly; the eight best third-placed teams completed the round of 32.

Group A

Team		P	Pts
1	Mexico	3	9
2	South Africa	3	4
3	South Korea	3	3
4	Czechia	3	1

Group B

Team		P	Pts
1	Switzerland	3	7
2	Canada	3	4
3	Bosnia & Herzegovina	3	4
4	Qatar	3	1

Group C

Team		P	Pts
1	Brazil	3	7
2	Morocco	3	7
3	Scotland	3	3
4	Haiti	3	0

Group D

Team		P	Pts
1	USA	3	6
2	Australia	3	4
3	Paraguay	3	4
4	Türkiye	3	3

Group E

Team		P	Pts
1	Germany	3	6
2	Ivory Coast	3	6
3	Ecuador	3	4
4	Curaçao	3	1

Group F

Team		P	Pts
1	Netherlands	3	7
2	Japan	3	5
3	Sweden	3	4
4	Tunisia	3	0

Group G

Team		P	Pts
1	Belgium	3	5
2	Egypt	3	5
3	Iran	3	3
4	New Zealand	3	1

Group H

Team		P	Pts
1	Spain	3	7
2	Cape Verde Islands	3	3
3	Uruguay	3	2
4	Saudi Arabia	3	2

Group I

Team		P	Pts
1	France	3	9
2	Norway	3	6
3	Senegal	3	3
4	Iraq	3	0

Group J

Team		P	Pts
1	Argentina	3	9
2	Austria	3	4
3	Algeria	3	4
4	Jordan	3	0

Group K

Team		P	Pts
1	Colombia	3	7
2	Portugal	3	5
3	Congo DR	3	4
4	Uzbekistan	3	0

Group L

Team		P	Pts
1	England	3	7
2	Croatia	3	6
3	Ghana	3	4
4	Panama	3	0

The knockout, round by round

All thirty-two results. Germany and the Netherlands fell on penalties in the round of 32, Brazil fell to Norway a round later — and the third-place game produced ten goals.

Did money buy the trophy?

Mostly, yes: the champion cost €1.47bn and three of the four priciest squads reached the semifinals. But Argentina reached the final at €818M, Mexico finished as the tournament's best value-for-money side, and Congo DR reached the knockouts at €134M. Money sets the prior; football still plays the match.

Model vs reality — the record it earned

Every simulation was published to an immutable ledger before kickoff, then graded against what happened. The knockout record: 61 of 62 stage placements called. The honest part: match by match the betting market called more (57 of 80 to our 51) and was sharper — and the model still landed both semifinal upsets the market missed.

The Obsidian vault: memory as a feature

• [[Write-only producer, pure renderer — the app never reads the vault, so it can never poison its own data path.
• [[Link integrity is CI — a dangling wikilink fails the build; the graph is provably connected.
• [[It already ships features — the on-site team knowledge graph renders from the same structure.
• [[RAG-ready — retrieval over curated, linked, versioned truth instead of scraped soup.

How the tournament moved

The vault's git history kept what the app's caches never did: 64 twice-daily snapshots of the whole tournament. These curves are read straight from that history.

What this app proved about AI in ordinary life