The Football World Cup kicks off on 11 June. For many groups of friends and workplace teams it means one thing — six weeks of debate about who really understands football best. If you have ever organised a competition like this, you know that the biggest arguments are usually not about the results themselves, but about how the points should be counted.
Every group has different expectations. Some are happy with a simple system that only rewards the exact result. Others want to encourage participants to predict draws or away wins. And then there are the football diehards who want to predict goalscorers, assists and how many goals will fall in each match.
The good news is that you do not have to argue over a shared spreadsheet. The tournament is already fully prepared in our app, and you can click together the scoring rules exactly the way your group prefers.
What is ready in the app
Preparing a major tournament involves a lot of admin, and we have done it for you. This year's championship, hosted by the USA, Canada and Mexico, is the largest in history. It features 48 teams divided into 12 groups of four. That means a total of 104 matches spread over 39 match days.
All this data is already in the system. As soon as you create the league, the app automatically pulls in the full fixture list, dates, kick-off times and all participating teams. There is no need to type anything in by hand or keep track of when matches are played.
Setting up your own betting pool in five minutes
Setting up your own private space for predictions does not require any technical knowledge. The whole process is designed so that absolutely anyone can manage it, even from a mobile phone on the way to work.
You simply head to the sign-in page and use your Google account. There is no need to come up with and remember yet another password. After signing in, you click to create a new betting pool, select the 2026 Football World Cup from the list of supported competitions and name your league. It can be the name of your company, the nickname of your group at the pub, or anything else.
That is it. The app generates a unique eight-character code and a sharing link. You send that to your colleagues or friends. Once they click it and sign in, you, as the administrator, approve them. This way you have absolute certainty that no outsider can get into your league. If you want a deeper look at how privacy and security are handled, you can read more about the app.
Two basic scoring modes
The most interesting part happens in the rule settings. As the administrator, you can choose between two basic mathematical models for how predictions are evaluated. Pick the one that best fits the mindset of your group.
Tiered mode
This is the classic, time-tested model that most people know from paper betting sheets. Points are awarded in pre-defined fixed categories according to how closely the prediction matches reality.
The system works as follows. If you predict the score exactly, you get 5 points. If you do not nail the exact result but correctly call a draw, you get 4 points. If you correctly pick the winner but get the score wrong, that is 3 points. If you get the winner wrong, you leave with zero. It is simple, transparent and everyone knows where they stand immediately.
Downtrending mode
This model is more modern and rewards people who were close. It is ideal for groups where you do not want to punish someone who was off by a single goal with the same zero as someone who predicted a completely nonsensical result.
The basic principle is that each prediction starts at 8 points. For every goal by which your prediction differs from the actual result, you lose 1 point. The condition is that you must correctly pick the winner of the match. If you get the winner right, you are always guaranteed at least 1 point, even if the goal difference would otherwise exceed eight. If, on top of that, you predict the exact score, the system rewards you with a bonus of 5 extra points.
Let us look at an example. You predict that the home team will win 2:1. The actual result is 3:2. The deviation between your prediction and reality is 2 goals in total (one on each side). Your score is calculated as 8 minus 2, which is 6 points. You got the winner right, so the points stand. This system keeps people in the game even when a lot of goals are flying in and exact predictions become difficult.
Configurable bonuses
In addition to the basic mode, the app lets you switch on extra bonuses. In football, and especially at tournaments like the World Cup, these bonuses make a lot of sense.
People naturally tend to root for one side when they predict. As a result, they statistically predict draws very rarely. Yet draws are very common in the group stages of football championships. If you, as administrator, enable a draw bonus, anyone who correctly predicts one gets an extra point. You reward those who predict with their head rather than their heart.
The away-win bonus works in a similar way. In matches where the paper favourite is the away side, people often get confused and back the home team anyway. An extra point for a correct away-win prediction can shake the standings up in an interesting way.
A third popular bonus is the extra point for the correct goal difference. If you predict 3:1 and the match ends 2:0, you did not nail the exact score, but you correctly judged that one team would win by a two-goal margin. This bonus rewards a good read on the balance of power on the pitch.
Optional types of prediction
Basic score prediction is enough for most people. If you have followers of football in your group who watch the sport regularly, however, you can make the game tougher and more interesting by adding extra layers. In the settings section you can enable specific types of bets that are commonly used in sports analysis.
You can switch on Over/Under prediction — whether more or fewer than 2.5 goals will be scored in the match. Another option is Both Teams to Score (BTTS for short), where users simply answer yes or no. A third optional layer is Clean Sheet, where you predict whether either goalkeeper will keep his side clean.
You can enable all of these extra questions, just some of them or none. It is entirely up to you how complex you want your league to be.
Predicting scorers and assists
If you want to push your group's engagement to the absolute maximum, enable predictions for individual players. When people are not just watching the final score but waiting to see whether their chosen striker is the one who scores, the way they experience the match changes dramatically. It is exactly that moment when someone in front of the TV curses because a midfielder scored while they had backed the centre forward.
The app lets you award points both for the goalscorer and for the player who provides an assist. As the administrator, you set these point values yourself. Typically one to three points works well, so that one successful scorer cannot wipe out the points of someone who perfectly predicted the exact final score.
There is one specific aspect of national-team tournaments to keep in mind. While club competitions have fixed squads well in advance, at a World Cup head coaches finalise their squads only at the last minute. The app therefore cannot have squads ready automatically in advance. If you want to predict scorers, the league administrator has to upload the team squads into the system manually before the tournament starts. It takes a little time, but for the playing experience it is well worth it.
Changing rules mid-tournament
One of the biggest nightmares when organising a betting pool in Excel is the moment when, halfway through the tournament, the group agrees that the current scoring is unfair and needs changing. In a spreadsheet that means rewriting formulas and manually recalculating dozens of past matches, which almost always leads to mistakes.
In our app you do not need to worry about that. The system keeps a complete audit trail of all changes. If you, as administrator, decide on day five of the tournament to switch from tiered to downtrending mode, or to add a draw bonus, you just change it in the settings. The app immediately takes the new rules and retroactively recalculates absolutely all historical predictions for every player. The leaderboard updates to the new logic within seconds. Thanks to this, it is completely safe to experiment with the rules until you find the format that suits everyone.
Recommended settings for different audiences
Thanks to this flexibility, the app can serve very different types of community. Here are the three most common scenarios and our recommendations for how to set the league up.
A group of pub friends
If you are setting up a league for a few friends you occasionally meet for a beer, keep things as simple as possible. Not everyone in the group follows football every day. We recommend choosing tiered scoring. Do not switch on any bonuses, do not allow goalscorer or assist predictions and ignore additional bets such as Over/Under. People will just turn up, enter two numbers for the score and move on. It is fast, understandable and no one feels disadvantaged just because they do not know the names of Mexico's defenders.
A company league
A workplace team is a specific case. You have people from IT, accounting and sales, some of whom love football and some of whom only recognise the shape of the ball. The goal is for everyone to enjoy it and for the competition to fuel chats at the coffee machine. Here we have found that tiered scoring works best, but with an added draw bonus and a goal-difference bonus. This gives the game a light tactical layer, but is still not overly complex. Leave scorer predictions off, as they would needlessly put off colleagues who do not follow squads. If you would like more about how to handle such an activity in the workplace from a manager's perspective, we have prepared a detailed guide on how to organise a corporate betting pool for the 2026 Football World Cup.
Hardcore football fans
Are you playing with people from your amateur football club, or with a group who watch three matches a weekend? Here you can go all in. Turn on downtrending mode, which more fairly rewards precise predictions. Enable every available bonus. Definitely switch on goalscorer and assist predictions and add Both Teams to Score on top. For this group, predicting is not just fun — it is a test of their analytical abilities.
What the app does for you during the tournament
Once you have set the rules, the administrator's job is essentially over. As soon as the first whistle blows, the app takes over all the operational work. You do not need to look up results anywhere, you do not need to chase anyone for missing predictions. Take a look at how it works in practice.
The biggest killer of long tournaments is forgetfulness. The championship runs for 39 days, and it is completely normal for people to forget to submit their predictions. The app therefore works as your personal assistant. If it detects that you have not predicted, it sends a push notification straight to your phone screen. These reminders arrive in waves — four hours, two hours, one hour, thirty minutes and ten minutes before kick-off. Each one explicitly names the match that is approaching.
When the match is over, the system connects to the sports databases, pulls in the result and immediately recalculates points for everyone. Within seconds a notification pops up telling you how many points you have earned and how that affects your position in the table. The running standings — the leaderboard — work in real time. Everyone can see at a glance where they sit and how many points they are behind the colleague above them.
A very popular feature that keeps the league alive is the daily morning email. It is not generic spam. The app sends you a personalised summary of the previous day. You will find out who has taken the lead, what the biggest moves in the table were, and you will see the so-called tip of the day — a heads-up about a match that turned out surprisingly, or about someone who was the only one to predict the exact score. These emails work as the morning sports paper of your own group.
For banter and sharing the emotional ride, each betting pool has its own closed chat. You can comment on what is happening on the pitch, react to other people's messages and tease each other about the predictions that fell flat. A complete overview of all these tools is available in the features section.
Set up your league today
The 2026 Football World Cup will be a huge event, and it would be a shame not to use it to have some fun with the people close to you or with colleagues at work. You already have the tool you need — all that is left is to choose the rules that will suit you best.
For smaller and medium-sized groups of up to 20 participants, the whole platform is available completely free of charge. Details on how the limits work for larger corporate deployments can be found on the pricing page. If anything is unclear, take a look at the frequently asked questions section, or send us a message directly via our Facebook page — we are happy to help you with the setup.
Do not leave the organisation to the last minute. Head to the home page, click sign in with Google and prepare a betting pool for your group that follows your rules exactly.