England's World Cup journey begins tonight, but a mathematician warns that fans shouldn't get their hopes up.

Dr Ari Joury, a particle physicist and founder of AI firm Wangari, created 11 different models to predict who will win this year's tournament.

These digital tipsters crowned four different champions between them, but not a single one picked England.

Seven models backed Spain, two singled out Argentina as the likeliest winner, while France and the Netherlands were each the favourite of one prediction system.

Averaged across all the models, Dr Joury predicts that the Three Lions have a scant nine per cent chance of becoming champions.

But this doesn't necessarily mean it's time to give up on England just yet.

Dr Joury told the Daily Mail: 'A low probability isn't a prediction that England will fail – a small figure reflects a crowded field, not a doomed campaign.

'With nearly 50 teams and six or seven genuine contenders, the title chance is split many ways, so even an excellent side typically lands in single digits.'

However, the modelling suggests Spain still looks likely to come out on top.

Averaged across the models, Spain has a 20 per cent win probability, followed by France and Argentina at 14 per cent, and the Netherlands with 10 per cent.

Impressively, five distinct models gave Spain a greater than one–in–four chance of lifting the trophy this year – with one giving them nearly one–in–three odds.

Even when models backed other teams such as France or Argentina, they weren't predicted to win with nearly as much confidence.

For example, the system that picked France as the most likely winner with the highest probability only assigned the French team a 12 per cent chance of victory.

However, Dr Joury says that even a dominant Spanish side won't be able to rest on its laurels.

He says: 'In my pre–tournament forecast, Spain did come out as the most likely single winner – but "most likely" still meant a minority chance, not a safe bet.'

While Spain starts 'marginally ahead of a very tight pack', the intense competition at this year's World Cup means even the favourites are 'more likely to not win than to win'.

Dr Joury says: 'Tournament football is high–variance: it comes down to a handful of one–off knockout games where a single moment swings everything.'

Although it might seem more chaotic, Dr Joury chose to use multiple different models in order to balance out the biases and quirks of each predictive method.

He says: 'A single model hands you a single answer and no sense of how much it hinges on the dozens of choices buried inside it: which rating system, which goal distribution, which learning algorithm.'

Even when predicting the results of a single game, clear favourites Spain versus underdogs Morocco, every model returned a different result.

Dr Joury found that Spain's chances of winning that match ranged from a dominant 69 per cent down to just 25 per cent, with one system claiming that a draw was most likely.

This is a reflection of underlying biases in predictive models that aren't often apparent unless they are compared.

For example, some systems look at a team's current match form while others only look at their results in last year's matches.

Likewise, some try to predict the goal difference, while a few calculate the match results directly – resulting in very different outcomes in close games.

'No single model captures everything, and every model is wrong in its own way,' explains Dr Joury.

'Combining several means their individual errors tend to cancel out rather than compound, so the blended result is steadier and less hostage to any one method's blind spots.'

This comes after researchers from the University of Liverpool used a world–class supercomputer to chart England's probable journey through the tournament.

The researchers ran 1,000 simulations of matches from the group stages to the final, capturing everything from player ability to playing conditions, weather and altitude.

They found that the most likely outcome was a final between England and Spain, with the Spanish side ultimately proving victorious.

Their results gave England a 29 per cent chance of reaching the final, and a 17 per cent chance of winning the whole thing.

Spain, meanwhile, remained favourites, with a 26 per cent chance of victory.