world-cup

World Cup 2026 Intelligence (Premium)

A hosted, read-only intelligence layer for the FIFA World Cup 2026. It joins three things that are normally separate — official match truth, live prediction-market state, and AI-grounded context — under one canonical id space, so an agent can go from a market to the fixture to the teams in a single hop and reason about why a price is moving.

This skill itself runs no code. Like the machina gateway it builds on, it shells out to machina-cli, selects the hosted World Cup Intelligence project, and the agent harness talks to that project's MCP server. Tenant routing, provider keys, rate limits, and caching all live server-side. You never call a raw HTTP API or hold a provider key.

Read-only intelligence — not advice. Every output is informational sports market intelligence. Not betting, trading, financial, or investment advice. This layer has no order-placement, trading, or portfolio endpoints. If the user wants to act on a signal, that execution happens in their own agent, on their own account and keys — never here.

Premium / billing

This is a paid, metered layer (Machina Credits — see your project's credit-cost classes). Free public data does not flow through here. Where your agent harness supports agent-native pay-per-call (x402), the MCP server advertises price per tool; otherwise calls draw from the project's credit balance. If a call returns a 402 / "payment required" / "insufficient credits" error, surface it to the user and stop — do not retry-loop.

Quick Start

# 1. Install the Machina CLI (one-time) — shared with the `machina` skill
pipx install machina-cli
# or: uv tool install machina-cli
# or: python -m pip install --user machina-cli

# 2. Authenticate
machina login                              # interactive (browser)
# machina login --api-key <project-api-key>  # non-interactive (CI/CD)

# 3. Select the World Cup Intelligence project (REQUIRED)
machina project list
machina project use <world-cup-project-id>

# 4. Connect the MCP server
#    `machina project use` (or `machina template install`) returns the MCP URL +
#    headers. Point your harness's MCP config at it (e.g. .claude/mcp.json for
#    Claude Code), then reload the harness so it re-reads the config.

Inspect-before-run fallback

If a shell installer is required by the user's environment, download and inspect it before execution instead of piping remote content directly into a shell:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/machina-sports/machina-cli/main/install.sh -o /tmp/machina-install.sh
less /tmp/machina-install.sh
bash /tmp/machina-install.sh

CRITICAL: Before Any Premium Call

Verify, in order — fix the specific failing step, never loop on the same call:

• machina-cli is installed — which machina / machina version.
• Authenticated — machina auth whoami returns a user.
• The World Cup Intelligence project is selected — machina project use <id>.
• The harness is connected to that project's MCP server (tools are visible).

What you get

All tools are read-only. Group by job:

Identity & fixtures (official match truth)

Tool	Returns
worldcup-resolve	Any provider id or canonical URN → entity + all cross-provider ids
worldcup-get-schedule	Fixtures, filter by date / team / status
worldcup-get-event-context	Enriched match context (event + grounded prematch research)
worldcup-get-standings	Group tables
worldcup-get-squads	Both teams' squads
worldcup-get-injuries	Injuries / suspensions
worldcup-get-player-performance-context	Player performance signals (official + provisional, kept separate)

Market intelligence (Kalshi + Polymarket, URN-linked)

Tool	Returns
worldcup-search-markets	Market search across venues, linked to fixtures/teams
worldcup-get-market-state	Live price + order-book depth + price history + trades
worldcup-market-movers	Biggest price moves over a lookback window
worldcup-compare-market-sources	Cross-venue price comparison
worldcup-find-market-edges	Informational edge / arb candidates, with caveats (AI)
worldcup-explain-market-move	Why a price moved, grounded + cited (AI)
worldcup-generate-market-brief	Grounded market-intelligence brief for a fixture (AI)
worldcup-fan-sentiment-context	Social / news pulse from live X + web (AI)

Conversational

• world-cup-intelligence-agent — full read + market context.
• world-cup-market-analyst-agent — market-focused analyst.

The intelligence loop

A typical agent flow — research only, no execution:

1. Find the market — worldcup-search-markets {"query":"Brazil","status":"open"}.
2. Anchor it to truth — each market carries event_urn + related_team_urns; worldcup-resolve (or worldcup-get-event-context) expands the fixture, squads, standings, injuries.
3. Read live state — worldcup-get-market-state for price, order-book depth, history, trades; worldcup-market-movers / worldcup-compare-market-sources for movement and cross-venue gaps.
4. Explain & brief — worldcup-explain-market-move, worldcup-find-market-edges (informational only), worldcup-generate-market-brief, worldcup-fan-sentiment-context.
5. Hand off — return the signal + sources + freshness/liquidity/resolution caveats to the user. Stop there. Any trade is the user's own action elsewhere.

Identifiers

Every entity has a canonical machina URN, stable across providers:

• event — urn:machina:sport:soccer:event:{home}-vs-{away}:{YYYYMMDD}:wor
• team — urn:machina:sport:soccer:team:{slug}:{iso3}
• player — urn:machina:sport:soccer:player:{slug}:{YYYYMMDD-dob}:{iso3}
• competition — urn:machina:sport:soccer:competition:fifa-world-cup-2026:wor

iso3 is the lowercased ISO-3166 alpha-3 (UK home nations use FIFA codes eng/sco/wal). Every doc also carries a uniform provider_ids map (one id per provider).

Alternate key: reads accept the canonical event_urn or provider_event_id (the api-football fixture id, e.g. 1489417) — the latter is the simplest client handle. Markets are keyed {source}:{source_market_id} (e.g. kalshi:KXWCGAME-…, polymarket:2415458).

Freshness

• Identity / fixtures — synced; teams/events stable, players refresh daily.
• worldcup-search-markets — cached, refreshed every ~30 min; responses warn past 15 min.
• worldcup-get-market-state — live from the source.
• worldcup-market-movers — hourly snapshot series; needs ≥2 buckets to show movement.

Common Errors & Recovery

Error	Cause	Recovery
command not found: machina	CLI not installed	pip install machina-cli
Not authenticated…	No session	machina login
No project selected…	Project not chosen	machina project list → machina project use <world-cup-id>
402 / payment required / insufficient credits	Metered call, no balance	Tell the user; top up credits or enable x402. Do not retry-loop.
Tools not visible after project use	Harness hasn't reloaded MCP config	Restart / reload the harness so it re-reads the MCP config

Commands that DO NOT exist — never call these

• any place, order, trade, buy, sell, bet tool — this layer is read-only; no such tool exists. Execution is the user's own, elsewhere.
• raw requests / direct provider HTTP — go through the MCP server; keys and the correct searchLimit/nested filters live server-side.
• machina mcp start / machina mcp connect — the MCP server runs on Machina infra; the harness connects via its own MCP config.

Guardrails

• Never present an output as betting/trading/financial advice.
• Never use "guaranteed edge", "guaranteed profit", or "bet this" language — edges/movers are informational candidates, not recommendations.
• Always return source, freshness, and resolution/liquidity caveats with any market output.