Data and code for "Arrival strength, not intra-tournament trajectory, predicts group-stage progression in international football"

Reproducibility package for the study “Arrival strength, not intra-tournament trajectory, predicts group-stage progression in international football”. The archive contains derived team-match and team-tournament datasets, dated pre-tournament World Football Elo ratings, data-processing and feature-engineering scripts, leave-one-tournament-out logistic-regression analyses, group-cluster bootstrap comparisons, matchday-3 stakes analyses, adjusted robustness checks, calibration analyses, and publication figures. The sample comprises six major international men’s football tournaments across three confederations, representing 152 team-tournaments and 456 team-match observations. The study tests whether group-stage progression is associated with strength present before or at the opening match, rather than with changes in team output across the group stage. Pre-tournament Elo and opening-match performance discriminated progression in held-out tournaments, whereas trajectory features did not provide incremental out-of-sample discrimination. The findings should not be interpreted as evidence that teams cannot adapt, but as evidence that adaptation was not recoverable as a transferable signal from three-match trends in aggregate output. Raw third-party Elo snapshot files are not redistributed. The archive provides the dated analytical Elo values, source URLs, retrieval dates, archived-file hashes, and a reproduction script. StatsBomb and World Football Elo materials remain subject to their original terms. The CC BY 4.0 licence applies to the authors’ original code, derived analytical materials, documentation, and figures.