The 2026 FIFA World Cup is no longer just kicking off — it's kicking into gear. With the group stage and Round of 32 behind us and quarter-finals already played out across Boston, Los Angeles, Miami and Kansas City, the tournament is barrelling toward its final weeks at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19. For millions of fans following along from their desks, that means one thing: the office sweepstake is entering its most chaotic, most-argued-about phase.

It's exactly the moment a new tool called SweepKick is built for.

A digital upgrade for a very old tradition

The World Cup sweepstake is a workplace ritual almost as old as the tournament itself — someone photocopies a grid, colleagues chip in a few pounds, names get pulled from a hat (or, more often, a mug), and for the next month half the office is unreasonably invested in the fortunes of a country they couldn't previously find on a map.

SweepKick, built by Milton Keynes-based agency BPW Design, keeps that same basic spirit but replaces the paper grid and the hat with something built for 2026: a slick, animated team draw for an office or club, where each person gets a fair slice of all 48 nations, points stack up as the tournament unfolds, and a live leaderboard does the rest.

That "48 nations" detail matters this year more than any other. This is the first World Cup to expand from 32 to 48 teams, which means more entrants can be involved, more names to draw, and — for anyone running the sweep manually — a lot more scope for an argument about whether the draw was really random.

How it works

Rather than a single global sweepstake, SweepKick is built around individual, shareable sweeps: browsing the site's homepage shows existing examples like "Dribblers" and "Kids Club," each with its own unique link that can be opened and shared with a group. The animated draw handles distributing the 48 competing nations fairly among participants, and as results come in through the tournament, points accumulate automatically on a shared leaderboard — sparing organisers the now-traditional spreadsheet duty of updating scores after every match.

Because the format is reusable rather than tied to a single event, it's pitched as a tool that could resurface for any club or office running a sweep — not just this World Cup, but future tournaments too.

So

With the semi-finals looming and the sweepstake table starting to separate the lucky from the unlucky, tools like this are landing at their natural moment: the point in the tournament when the person who drew Uzbekistan starts loudly reassessing their chances, and the person who drew one of the host nations starts acting insufferably confident.

Whether SweepKick becomes the new office standard or just a nicer-looking version of the same old ritual, it's a small sign of how even the most low-tech traditions of a home-and-office World Cup are getting nudged into the app era — one shareable link and animated draw at a time.

https://www.sweepkick.app/