A plain-English guide — what a sweepstake actually is, how the new 48-team format changes it, prize splits that don't cause arguments, and the bits people always forget.
An office sweepstake is the simplest gambling-adjacent game in the world. Everyone chucks a fiver into the kitty. Names go in a hat. Teams come out of another. Whoever pulls the team that wins the tournament takes the pot. That's it. No spreadsheets. No betting accounts. No "what's the spread on Mexico v Croatia" — just a random draw and a long-running argument about whether Belgium are actually any good.
The format works because it does the one thing offices need: it lets everyone follow the tournament, even the people who don't follow football. The accountant who can't name a single Brazilian player suddenly has a vested interest in Brazil getting past the group stage. It's the great equaliser of any World Cup year.
Two reasons. One: the game is more fun with a tenner on it, even if your team is Honduras and your odds are mathematically zero. Two: it's the only office tradition where the IT person, the receptionist and the CEO are all hoping their team scores against literally each other. Hierarchies dissolve the moment the group stage starts. Worth £5 alone.
The objection used to be "it's a faff". And it was — printing 32 teams, cutting them up, fishing them out of someone's beanie hat, writing down who got who on a napkin that mysteriously vanishes by Tuesday. We'll come back to that.
The 2026 tournament is the first 48-team World Cup, expanded from 32. Hosted across the United States, Mexico and Canada, the format that matters for your sweepstake looks like this:
For sweepstake purposes the practical implication is this: with 48 teams in the draw, you can run a proper one-team-per-person pool for an office of up to 48 people. Below that, you either run multiple rounds (each player gets two or three teams) or accept that some teams won't be picked. Both work — pick whichever feels right for your group.
The paper version is the one your dad has been running since 1990. Write each team on a slip of paper. Write each player's name on a separate set of slips. Pull one of each at random. Match them up. Take a photo before someone "loses" theirs.
The friction with paper is real but small: you need a list of all 48 qualified nations (groups weren't decided until the December 2025 draw, so the team names have to be current); you need somewhere to keep the master list; and if anyone joins late, you're cutting up paper again.
The digital version is, well, the reason this site exists. One shareable link. Teams allocate at random as players join. The list lives somewhere everyone can see it. People who join late get whatever's left, like they would with paper, just without the scissors.
This is the part to actually decide before the tournament kicks off — not on the night of the final when the spreadsheet's gone missing. Common formats:
Whatever you pick, write it down and stick it in the group chat before kickoff. The single biggest source of office sweepstake arguments is "I thought we agreed top two split" three weeks in.
Say you've got 20 people in your pool at £5 each — a £100 pot. Here's roughly what a sensible split looks like:
That keeps 4 of 20 people in the money — enough that most of the office is still watching the third-place playoff instead of pretending it doesn't exist. If you wanted to keep more people invested, slice off another £10 each for the four group-stage exits with the most goals scored and reduce the winner's share to £40. There's no "right" answer; the rule is just to publish the numbers before the first whistle.
Most offices won't have 48 entrants. Three options:
For a group of, say, 12 people, the cleanest setup is four rounds of three teams each. Everyone's got at least one team in every group of four, which means everyone's invested in every group-stage match. Tournament drama maxed out.
This is a free tool we built for our own office sweepstake because the existing options are either paid (£3–5 per pool, which feels cheeky for what is fundamentally a random number generator) or look like they were designed in 2008. There's no payment tier, no premium upsell, no email-marketing follow-up sequence. You create a pool, share a link, watch a FUT-style walkout when your team lands, and the leaderboard updates as matches finish. If you lose the link, we email it back. That's the entire feature set.
If you're running an office sweepstake in 2026, save yourself the scissors phase.
Related: How it works · FAQ · World Cup 2026 sweepstake