One real matchup, worked through by hand — then the same coin-flip-by-rating logic run across a full simulated tournament, 140,000 times, using each team's Elo rating from before their current coach arrived
One match: Netherlands 🇳🇱 vs Argentina 🇦🇷
2022 World Cup quarterfinal, worked through by hand
One simulated tournament, run 20,000× per year
32-team era (1998–2022), pre-coach Elo, re-bracketed and replayed each trial
Domestic-coached
Foreign-coached
Left: this is the exact calculation run for every match, at every round, in the simulation on the right — the stronger-rated team wins more often, but never certainly. In reality, the 2022 quarterfinal finished 2–2 after extra time; Argentina won 4–3 on penalties and went on to win the tournament. Right: each column pools every simulated tournament's outcome at that stage into one round-wide proportion; icons are a unit count (enough solid-foreign icons to cover the round's foreign share, one icon split for the remainder, the rest solid domestic) not individual teams. Elo ratings and win-probability formula: eloratings.net.