Ever since the dawn of competitive sports, there have been masses of people who attempted to predict sports results, whether it’s a small, meaningless match, a world cup match, or an entire tournament. There are a lot of tightly specialized companies that only deal with results predictions for various sports (that are generally very good at it by the way!) and today, Prima Games is making an attempt to predict today’s USA – Iran soccer match at the FIFA Qatar World Cup 2022 Group Stage. The match sparks a lot of interest worldwide and we couldn’t wait to see the outcome.
We used FIFA 23 for the match simulation, and we’ll explain how we set up the A.I. and what settings we have used.
Match Prediction: USA vs Iran at FIFA Qatar World Cup 2022
For the purposes of this article, we used the following settings within FIFA 23, and of course, made the AI fight each other. This fierce sport battle took place at Al Bayt Stadium.
Half Length was set to 5 minutes, the Difficulty Level was set to Legendary (maximum), and Game Speed was set to “Default”.
We did our best to make everything as realistic as we could, given how FIFA 23 functions.
Related: How to Do the Griddy in FIFA 23
The rosters that we used, along with the formation and tactics, are based on their most recent matches.
The outcome of this match was: United States 2 : 1 Iran.
USA picked up a lead in the 23rd minute (22:36) with an outstanding goal by Yunus Musah. A little bit later, Mark McKenzie scored the 2nd goal for Team USA in the 40th minute (39:42).
All in all, the USA was dominating the first half, with the ball mostly being on Iran’s half of the pitch. In the second half, Iran decided to fight back as hard as possible, with nothing left to lose, but they came up shorthanded in the end. Sardar Azmoun scored a goal in the 76th minute (75:12) and that was the last goal in this match.
In the 90th minute, Iran had a corner, and you could see the goalkeeper of Iran make his way to the USA goal in a hail-mary attempt to be the +1 and help his team even the match in the last minute, however, this attempt was not fruitful.
USA definitely could have done a lot more in this simulated match, as well as Iran, but that’s soccer for you! The goals weren’t that interesting but there are a few heart-attack situations.
Christian Pulisic tried to assist Timothy Weah, and look what happened (click to enlarge):
We think that this was a highway robbery by the refs and that the ball definitely bounced behind the goal line.
Related: FIFA 23 World Cup Path to Glory Explained
The next interesting excerpt is Christian Pulisic’s precise strike of a goalpost:
These are the post-match statistics. It was a pretty clean game and it seems that minor differences decided the outcome of a match that could have gone both ways.
What do you think? We are just hours away from the real match, and we can’t wait to see how the outcome will compare to our little simulation here.
