This afternoon, Ewen Gallic (aka @3wen) uploaded some recent work on his blog, based on some joint work with Enora Belz, Romain Gaté, Vincent Malardé and Jimmy Merlet (aka @JimmyMerlet), where they used the 2018 FIFA World Cup to play with predictive models (neural nets, SVM, boosting, trees, etc) on a large training dataset. Their joint paper is online, so far only in French.