Battle of the LLMs: Predicting the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup

I asked four AIs to simulate the FIFA CWC. Here’s who they think will lift the trophy.

Jun 09, 2025

FIFA Club World Cup 2025™ draw date announced

This summer marks the dawn of a new era for the FIFA Club World Cup. For the first time ever, 32 teams from across the globe will face off in a month-long showdown in the United States. Controversies and format changes aside, I thought it would be fun to pit multiple LLMs against each other in a friendly competition to see which AI performs best and gauge their accuracy.

Each model was given the exact same prompt and was tasked with simulating the entire tournament from which teams advanced in the group stage, knockout rounds, as well as predicting the MVP, top scorer, “dark horse”, and breakout revelation player.

Let’s take a look at how each fared along with a few funny and glaring mistakes they made along the way.

May the smartest model win!

OpenAI — ChatGPT Bracket

ChatGPT played it relatively safe and is perhaps one of the most grounded predictions of this competition, this model predicts what many experts are saying: this will turn into a UEFA Champions League - Summer Edition fairly quick.

🥇MVP: Vinicius Junior — Real Madrid

⚽Top Scorer: Erling Haaland (7 goals) — Manchester City

🐴 Black Horse: Al-Hilal for reaching the Round of 16 in a group where, at least in paper, Pachuca and Red Bull Salzburg are stronger.

💫 Revelation Player: Andrey Santos — Chelsea, on loan at Strasbourg

❌ Notable Errors: It didn’t make a difference, but ChatGPT stated that Alajuelense from Costa Rica was going to be part of the tournament in Group D. There was a big drama surrounding the potential inclusion of this team that led to Club Leon being disqualified. Nonetheless, LAFC ended up being the last team in the tournament after beating Club America in a playoff a couple weeks ago.

Google — Gemini Bracket

Both ChatGPT and Gemini must be training on the exact same dataset when it comes to football predictions, as the bracket provided by Gemini was a carbon copy of ChatGPT’s. There is however some variation at the individual performances as you will see below.

🥇MVP: Jude Bellingham — Real Madrid

⚽Top Scorer: Tie between Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappe (7 goals) — Manchester City & PSG (!!!) despite Mbappe being a Real Madrid player.

🐴 Black Horse: Al-Hilal, for the same reasons as listed above.

💫 Revelation Player: Franco Mastantuono — River Plate (Keep an eye on this kid)

❌ Notable Errors: Gemini actually successfully listed LAFC as part of Group D; however, it made a glaring mistake at stating that Kylian Mbappe was still part of PSG. I’m honestly quite surprised at this error, considering the Mbappe-Real Madrid saga was very big and Mbappe actually just won the Golden Boot with Real Madrid this past season.

Perplexity Bracket

I had high expectations from Perplexity; their entire value proposition yields on the ability to search the web real-time (at least Perplexity was amongst the first ones to do it for free) and provide sources. With little less than a week for the tournament to begin, Perplexity provided a very inaccurate bracket with matches that can’t even happen as you will see below.

🥇MVP: Ousmane Dembele — PSG

⚽Top Scorer: Erling Haaland (8 goals) — Manchester City

🐴 Black Horse: Inter Miami for reaching the quarterfinals (a very unlikely scenario in my opinion)

💫 Revelation Player: Endrick — Palmeiras(!!!) despite having already completed a season as a Real Madrid player.

❌ Notable Errors: The entire bracket. A lot of the matchups given by Perplexity can’t happen. For instance, there’s no way Real Madrid can face FC Porto in the Round of 16 nor Inter Miami facing Juventus. Additionally, as stated above, Endrick is a Real Madrid player, and he no longer plays in Palmeiras.

Anthropic — Claude Bracket

Similar to Perplexity, Claude provided another bracket that doesn’t make any sense in which the predicted matchups cannot even take place. For example, Manchester City (Group G) cannot face Palmeiras (Group A) in the Round of 16 or Bayern Munich (Group C) cannot face Al Ahly (Group A).

🥇MVP: Vinicius Junior — Real Madrid

⚽Top Scorer: Erling Haaland (8 goals) — Manchester City

🐴 Black Horse: Mamelodi Sundowns for reaching the Round of 16 ultimately losing against PSG

💫 Revelation Player: Peter Shalulile — Mamelodi Sundowns

❌ Notable Errors: Like Perplexity, Claude’s matchups don’t align with the group draw. Additionally, Claude made an observation that the Silver Boot would belong to Kylian Mbappe but indicated that he was a PSG player. This raises some questions about how well Claude and Perplexity integrate with relatively recent events.

Conclusion

Each AI brought a unique lens to the beautiful game, while some models like ChatGPT and Gemini leaned on logic and historic pedigree, others like Perplexity and Claude embraced a little chaos and surprise picks, perhaps at the cost of hallucinating the potential bracket matchups.

Most of them ended up giving the same result however: Real Madrid is the favorite to win the tournament.

Whether any of these predictions turn to be true out remains to be seen, but I do think it’s fascinating (and a bit amusing) to see how even the most powerful models can still fumble facts about football’s biggest names and misread simple brackets. But I suppose that’s part of the charm and serve as a reminder that even in the age of AI, the unpredictability of football remains undefeated. For the time being, I think football analysts are safe from being replaced by AI, perhaps I should think about a career change in that direction…

What do you think? What are your predictions for this new but controversial tournament? Are you excited to watch the tournament? Let me know in the comments or by restacking this post!

Thanks for reading! ✌️