Good Morning ☀️,

It’s Lucas here, your Chief Predictions Officer at What Are the Odds?

It’s day three of the World Cup. And while the match schedule is heating up, early reports seem to suggest attendance might be cooling down.

Tl;dr — games that apparently had capacity attendances clearly had thousands of empty seats. But more on that in a moment.

First, let’s take a look at what’s coming up in today’s special World Cup edition of What Are the Odds?

What’s ahead in today’s edition:

• We investigate strange attendance numbers at this year’s World Cup. 🧐

• Today’s game schedule. 🗓️

• Our top pick of the day. ✅

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Today, we’ve got three matches coming up. (Note: all dates and times are in Eastern Time)

🇶🇦 Qatar vs. 🇨🇭 Switzerland

• Time: 15:00 ET

• Venue: Levi’s Stadium

• Location: Santa Clara, California

🇧🇷 Brazil vs. 🇲🇦 Morocco

• Time: 18:00 ET

• Venue: MetLife Stadium

• Location: East Rutherford, New Jersey

🇭🇹 Haiti vs. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland

• Time: 21:00 ET

• Venue: Gillette Stadium

• Location: Foxborough, Massachusetts

Want to get the best odds on today’s matches?

We’ve heard a lot about ticket prices at this year’s FIFA World Cup. And I’m sure you’re all more or less up to date with the whole situation. But, just in case you’re not, the story basically goes like this: FIFA jacked up ticket prices; fans not happy; the end.

So now that the World Cup is finally here, the question we really want answered is how much of an impact ticket prices have had on attendance. And the early answer, it seems, is quite a bit.

Or, at least, that’s how it might seem.

Yesterday, Reuters reported that images from the South Korea vs Czech Republic match showed thin crowds throughout the stadium. And this was despite FIFA claiming 44,985 people attended the game.

So, on one hand we’ve got FIFA claiming the stadium was basically full (Estadio Guadalajara has about a capacity of about 46,000). And on the other, we’ve got images showing that, clearly, it was far from nearing max capacity.

And this isn’t the only strange bit about apparent ticket sales.

In the same Reuters article, FIFA President Gianni Infantino was quoted as saying that demand for tickets had exceeded FIFA’s expectations by "a factor of 10 or more."

Now, clearly, that’s probably a slight exaggeration. For ticket sales to have exceeded expectations by a “factor of 10 or more”, then FIFA would have had to be planning for sub-10% attendance figures. And clearly, that would be dumb. (The math works like this: The most tickets FIFA can sell is 100% of tickets. So if they sold 100% of tickets and that number exceeded their estimates by a factor of 10, then their estimates were to only sell 100% ÷ 10, which is 10% of tickets.)

But what makes this whole thing interesting is that FIFA still has (as of a couple of days ago) over 180,000 tickets sitting stagnant on its resale platform.

So why’s that interesting?

Well, that already gives us some clue as to what might have happened at the South Korea vs Czech Republic match. People bought up a bunch of tickets and, for reasons unknown to us, didn’t end up using those tickets. (Guess it’s hard for one person to use multiple tickets they failed to resell.)

On the plus side, this sort of situation isn’t exactly unprecedented. So this doesn’t necessarily mean ticket prices are to blame.

To give one example, there was a similar situation in an Egypt vs Uruguay match back in 2018’s World Cup — plenty of tickets sold, but match attendance was well below official ticket sales numbers. In that case, FIFA said it was “launching an investigation” into what happened, and initially pointed the finger at “no shows” — way to state the obvious, hey?

Then, in the last World Cup, things got especially weird. It all started when stadium capacities apparently grew by as much as 12% overnight when FIFA started reporting attendance numbers that exceeded stadium capacities. And as if having attendance numbers exceeding 100% of stadium capacity wasn’t weird enough, there were images circulating showing thousands of empty seats at those games. Very weird.

So what do we make of this year’s mystery?

Honestly, we have no idea. The only thing we can say for sure is that, given that weird attendance numbers have happened in the past, ticket prices might not be the only thing to blame.

Let’s see how things develop from here.

⚽ Brazil vs Morocco
🏟️ 2026 FIFA World Cup
📅 Saturday 13 June; 03:00 (Europe/Paris)

• Why we’re watching: This is one of the more high-profile games today. And the best part is, there’s a solid-looking double chance play to go with it.

• Top 3 Stats:

  • Brazil is currently #6 in the FIFA World Rankings.

  • Morocco is currently #7 in the FIFA World Rankings.

  • The last time these two met was in an international friendly game in 2023. Morocco, playing at home, won that game 2-1.

• CXSports says: The consensus opinion on this one has Brazil pegged as the favorite. And it kinda makes sense given Brazil made the list of top-5 favorites to win the entire competition.
  
  But this is probably not as clear cut of a “Brazil by default” game as some are expecting it to be. Yes, Brazil’s last three warm-up games produced 11 goals, including 6-2 vs Panama, 3-1 vs Croatia, and 2-1 vs Egypt. So it’s clear their attack is firing on all cylinders, even in the absence of several key players. But let’s not forget that Brazil also conceded four goals in those same three matches. And while that’s not exactly a disastrous number, it is the kind of performance that Morocco could easily punish.
  
  To see why, just take a look at Morocco’s numbers. Sure, their ~1.9 goals scored per match is behind Brazil. But, with just 0.4 conceded per match and a 60% clean sheet record, there’s clearly the potential here for Morocco to put serious pressure on Brazil’s attack. In effect, if Morocco can lock down its defense while continuing to plug away at Brazil’s more mediocre attack, there’s a chance they might do some damage.
  
  With that said, the injuries might just kill it for Morocco. In particular, losing Aguerd and Ezzalzouli hurts them both defensively, and in the sort of counter-attacking bite they’ll need.
  
  So, where does that leave us with this game? More likely than not, Morocco will be good enough to score. But Brazil’s attacking form combined with Morocco’s injury list makes the case for Brazil hard to ignore. However, this is far from a clear-cut “Brazil is the favorite” game, and if we were wanting to play this safely, we’d probably hedge that by allowing the possibility of Morocco keeping Brazil’s offense at bay enough to hold this one to a draw.
  

• Score prediction: Brazil 2-1 Morocco

Bet Option #1

• Bet: Brazil Victory

• Odds Range: 1.47-1.70

Bet Option #2

• Bet: Double Chance (Brazil / Draw)

• Odds Range: 1.09-1.17

Make your sportsbook work for you!

Tomorrow, things really start to pick up, with 5 — yes, 5 — fixtures scheduled:

• Australia vs Türkiye

• Germany vs. Curaçao

• Netherlands vs. Japan

• Ivory Coast vs. Ecuador

• Sweden vs. Tunisia

But until then, there’s still plenty of action ahead today. So, on that note, this is us signing off so we can go and enjoy today’s World Cup action.

Until tomorrow, we hope you get a chance to do the same.