Search "office sweepstake template" and you get a hundred near-identical spreadsheets: a grid of names, a column of countries, and a formula nobody trusts. They all work for about a week. Here is a cleaner template, the rules that stop the usual arguments, and an honest note on when a spreadsheet is the wrong tool entirely.
The classic draw template
A sweepstake is the random-draw version of an office pool: every colleague is assigned a team out of a hat, and whoever drew the eventual winner takes the pot. You can run it on a single page. Here is everything you need on it:
- A list of all 48 teams, one per slip, for the 2026 tournament.
- A list of players — your colleagues — with a column for the team each one draws.
- An entry fee (optional), and a note of who has paid.
- The prize split. The classic is winner-takes-all, but paying out the runner-up's team and the top scorer's team keeps more people interested.
- The draw date — before the opening match on 11 June 2026 — and who is doing the drawing in front of witnesses.
Copy-paste starter: "World Cup 2026 office sweepstake. £5 a slip. Draw on Friday at 4pm in the kitchen. 48 teams, drawn at random, one each until we run out — then we double up. Winner's team takes 70%, runner-up 20%, most-watched upset 10%. Pay [name] by Thursday."
The rules that keep a draw fair
- Draw in public. The fastest way to poison a sweepstake is a draw nobody saw. Do it in the kitchen, on camera, or let a neutral colleague pull the slips.
- Decide what happens with 48 teams and, say, 30 people. Either some people get two teams, or you only draw the seeded teams. Agree it before the draw, not after.
- Write the payout down. "Winner takes all" is fine, but spreading it across two or three outcomes means the room is still watching in week four.
Why the spreadsheet always dies
Here is the part the templates never tell you. A draw-based sweepstake has a structural problem: most people are mathematically out after the group stage. If you drew Costa Rica and they go home on 25 June, you have three weeks of tournament left and nothing to care about. The spreadsheet did its job perfectly and the competition still died, because the format only rewards one lucky draw.
The spreadsheet has a second problem, which is admin. Even the simplest version needs someone to collect the money, run the draw, track the results and pay out. For a team of ten that is a coffee's worth of effort. For an office of fifty across three floors, it is a part-time job that lands on one unlucky person.
The fix isn't a better spreadsheet — it's a different format
If you want everyone still playing on the final weekend, switch from a random draw to a prediction league, where people pick results all the way through and score points as they go. Nobody is ever knocked out, because there is always another match to predict. We cover the full how-to in running an office World Cup pool in 2026.
And if you do not want to run any of it by hand, that is what Sweepup is. It is the office sweepstake without the spreadsheet: one shared code, colleagues join in seconds with just a name, predictions are scored automatically across all 104 matches, and the leaderboard updates itself and drops into Slack or Teams. HR or the office manager buys it once — from £49, refundable before kick-off — and never touches a formula.
A spreadsheet is free but costs you the admin and dies by the group stage. Sweepup costs from £49 and runs the whole tournament on autopilot. For most offices of 30+, the maths is not close.
Want to see the difference before deciding? Take the live demo — no sign-up, no card.