A World Cup sweepstake is a tiny social ritual that almost nobody has decent software for, which is exactly the kind of gap that used to stay unfilled and now gets filled before breakfast in less than 2 hours.
Tracking it well turns out to be less about scores and more about answering one private question: how are my teams doing?
It’s the start of the World Cup, and like a lot of people I’m in a couple of group sweepstakes.
You know the shape of it. Everyone gets drawn one or a few teams, and you half-follow how your lot are doing for the next month. Someone ends up with Brazil and won’t shut up about it. Someone ends up with three teams who are out by the second week and quietly stops checking. It’s good fun.
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So when the draw landed this year, I went looking for a way to actually track mine especially as the timezones are crazy for matches being in the USA and me being in the UAE.
There was nothing good.
I was genuinely surprised by how thin the tooling is for something so common. Millions of people do an sweepstake every four years, and the best most of us manage is a WhatsApp group and a screenshot of a handwritten list. So I did the obvious thing, the thing this whole series is about, and built it myself before breakfast.
It’s at worldcup.leemallon.com.
The brief
A tracker for the sweepstake you’re already in. Not a fantasy league, not a betting product, not another scores app. Just the thin layer of software that sits on top of the little ritual you already do with friends and family.
Then a second thought, which is where it got interesting: if it’s useful to me, it’s useful to everyone I’m in a pool with. So it had to be shareable from the start, not as an afterthought.
Setting it up
You go to the site and build a pool in about thirty seconds.
Name your pool and enter everyone who’s playing.
Choose how teams get assigned. Haven’t drawn yet? Let it auto-assign all 48 nations at random. Already done your draw on paper, the proper way, names out of a mug? Pick the team or teams for each person by hand so the app matches real life.
The first time you open a pool it asks one question: which player are you, or are you just watching? Then it remembers, on your device, and never asks again.
From that moment the home page is yours:
Your league position, and how many of your teams are still alive.
Your teams, with the knocked-out ones struck through (a small, brutal little line that tells you everything).
Your next match highlighted, and the fixtures coming up.
Your recent results, each stamped with a W, L or D from your perspective, not just a neutral scoreline.
That last point is the whole philosophy in miniature. A scores app tells you Brazil 2, Switzerland 1. It tells you a fact. Your sweepstake doesn’t care about the fact. It cares whether that was a win for you. The app answers the question you’re actually asking, which is rarely “what was the score” and almost always “was that good or bad for me?”
Following the whole pool
Beyond your own corner, the pool gives you everything you’d want to glance at over a coffee:
Results as they come in: who won, and crucially whose team won.
The group tables and the full knockout bracket as the tournament unfolds.
A leaderboard that ranks everyone by how many of their teams are still standing. Podium, medals for the top three, the leader glowing gold. During the groups it counts your top-two teams. Once the knockouts start it tracks who is genuinely still in.
It mirrors the real 2026 format too, 48 teams in 12 groups, the top two plus the eight best third-placed sides going through, a Round of 32 running all the way to the final, a third-place playoff, and knockout ties settled on penalties. The same structure you’ll be shouting at on the TV.
The celebrations
Tap any finished match and you get a full-time card: a confetti burst and a line tailored to the moment. “Point for Sam” in the groups. “Brazil go through!” in the knockouts. “Take the bronze 🥉” in the third-place playoff. “World Champions 🏆” for the final. Always finishing with a “Well done” to whoever owns the winning team.
Sharing it
Once your pool is created you get a share link and a QR code. Send it round, and everyone opens the exact same live view: same fixtures, same results, same standings. No accounts, no sign-up, no app to install. The link is the access.
And it’s deliberately view-only. Once a pool is set up it locks, so a shared link lets people follow along but never quietly edit the draw in their own favour. Open the site fresh another day and it even lists the pools you’ve visited, so you can jump straight back in without hunting for the link.
Living in your calendar
The part I’m quietly pleased with is the calendar integration, because following a tournament is really about knowing when your teams play.
Add a single match to your calendar (Google, Apple, or Outlook), in your own timezone, so there’s no mental arithmetic at kickoff.
Or subscribe to the whole feed and have every fixture land in your calendar automatically.
Or get narrower still: subscribe to just one person’s teams, or a single nation, each as its own calendar link.
This is the bit that turns a website you remember to check into something that gently taps you on the shoulder when your team is about to play. The software disappears into a tool you already use all day.
The little touches
There’s a live ticker tape across the top with the latest results and what’s coming up next, so the scores are always in your eyeline. Under the title there’s a random World Cup fact on every visit, pulled from a hundred of them, because every page deserves one small reason to come back.
And the data is real. It pulls live fixtures, scores and results straight from the official feed, not something I’m typing in by hand at half time. It’s cached behind the scenes so it stays fast and reliable even when half the planet is refreshing at once.
If you’re in a pool this World Cup, go and build yours. Then tell me which no-hoper you got lumped with, and whether the app made you check on them anyway.
The video demo
check it out at worldcup.leemallon.com
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