Does Fanzava run a sweepstake with names drawn at random?

No. A sweepstake in the Irish and British sense, names pulled from a hat against a field of runners, is not a format Fanzava ships. We run prediction leagues and knockout brackets, where people make predictions and those predictions score. If the random draw is what you want, keep doing it on paper and run the prediction league alongside it.

What should we run for the World Cup instead?

Match-by-match predictions across the group stage, then a bracket for the knockouts. The group stage is 72 matches, which is three weeks of daily engagement a bracket cannot reach, and the bracket then gives the knockout rounds a proper scoring shape. Both run in one branded hub with automatic fixtures and results.

Why does a sweepstake work for the Grand National but not the World Cup?

Field size and duration. The National is a maximum of 34 runners settled in a single afternoon, so nobody is eliminated early and the whole thing resolves before the room's attention does. A 48-team tournament across 104 matches removes most of your players at the group stage and then asks them to care for another three weeks.

Can we still do the paper draw as well?

Absolutely, and most organisers should. The draw is a genuinely good thirty seconds and it gets people signed up. It just is not a four-week competition. Use it as the launch moment for the prediction league rather than as the competition itself.

Is there any money involved?

Not in Fanzava. No entry fees, no prize money, no odds and no wagering. It is deliberately not a betting product, which is what makes it approvable in a workplace, a school or a GAA club where a cash sweepstake would not be.

What does it cost to run one?

Plans start free, with the free plan covering 25 players and one competition at a time. Paid plans are billed in euro, and the pricing page carries the full breakdown of what each plan includes.

A well-used football on winter turf, the pitch empty and the light nearly gone.

Football sweepstake

A sweepstake takes thirty seconds to enter and ends the moment your team goes out.

That is the whole appeal and the whole problem. The draw pulls in the people who ignore everything else you run, then removes most of them before the tournament gets good. Here is what a sweepstake is, what it is not, and what to run alongside it.

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The tournaments an office sweepstake gets drawn for.

World Cup 2026: 48 teams in 12 groups of four, 104 matches. The biggest sweepstake field ever drawn, and the first that most offices are too small to draw cleanly.
How that group stage resolves: The top two from each group plus the eight best third-placed sides go through to a round of 32. Eight of the 12 groups send three teams onward, which is a genuinely new shape to explain.
The office maths problem: 48 names in a room of 20 desks means everyone draws two and eight names sit unclaimed. In a room of 60, a third of the room draws nothing.
The men's Euros: 24 teams in six groups of four. Small enough that a mid-sized office can draw one name each, which is why Euro sweepstakes feel tidier than World Cup ones.
Grand National: A maximum field of 34 runners, cut from 40 ahead of the 2024 race, over 30 fences and two circuits of Aintree.
Why a horse race suits a draw: One race, one afternoon, one result. Nobody needs to know anything, nobody is eliminated early, and the whole thing is settled in about nine minutes.
Why a tournament does not: A month-long competition drawn from a hat retires most of the room at the group stage and leaves the final to whoever got lucky in the draw.
FA Cup third round: 64 clubs, the round where the Premier League and Championship sides enter. A natural sweepstake moment, and a natural bracket.

How a sweepstake actually works, and where it stops.

Names go in, names come out.

Every runner or team in the field gets written down. Everyone taking part draws one at random. That is the entire mechanic, and its brilliance is that it requires no knowledge, no strategy and no explanation.
Nobody makes a single decision after that.

A sweepstake is pure chance from the moment the draw closes. There is nothing to submit, nothing to update, nothing to check on a Tuesday. That is why participation is near total and engagement is near zero.
Most people are out early.

In a 48-team World Cup, more than half the field is eliminated at the group stage. Everyone who drew one of those names has no reason to look at the sheet again for the remaining three weeks of the tournament.
Which is why the good version runs something alongside it.

Keep the draw for the thirty seconds of fun it genuinely delivers. Then run a bracket or a prediction league next to it so the room that drew badly still has something live in the quarter-finals.

Sweepstake, bracket and prediction league are three different competitions.

They get used interchangeably and they behave nothing alike. Knowing which one you actually want takes about a minute and saves a tournament.

A sweepstake is a draw, and Fanzava does not run the draw.

Names pulled at random against a field of runners is not a competition Fanzava ships, and we are not going to describe our product as one. If the random draw is the specific thing you want, a hat still does it better than any software. What Fanzava is for is everything that happens after the draw, when you need the room to stay interested.

A bracket is the sweepstake that keeps playing.

Everyone fills in the knockout tree themselves, from the round of 32 to the final. Every result scores, every round is worth something, and a person whose winner went out in the quarter-finals still has points on the board from the 14 matches before it. Brackets are a shipped Fanzava format, scored round by round.

Group-stage predictions cover the bit a bracket cannot.

The 2026 group stage is 72 of the tournament's 104 matches. A bracket ignores all of them. Match-by-match predictions across the group stage give your people three weeks of daily reasons to check in before the knockout tree even exists, then hand over to the bracket.

Confidence turns a flat tournament into a sharp one.

Rank your group-stage predictions by how sure you are and score the rank. Two people can pick identically and finish a long way apart because one of them put their weight on the right matches. Confidence weighting is part of Fanzava's scoring rather than a spreadsheet you maintain.

The hybrid most organisers land on.

Run the paper draw on the Friday before it starts, because people love it and it costs you nothing. Run the prediction league on Fanzava for the whole tournament. The draw gets you the sign-ups, the prediction league gets you the four weeks.

No entry fees, no prize money, no stakes.

Fanzava is a fan and workplace engagement platform, deliberately not a betting product. There are no odds, no wagering and no money moving through it. What people are playing for is the leaderboard, and in a workplace that is usually the version you can actually approve.

What a tournament competition looks like on Fanzava.

Set up in an afternoon, running for the whole tournament.

Your logo, your colours, your name on the competition. People join by link or QR code and are predicting inside a minute, in a phone browser, with nothing to install. A tournament moment has a short runway, and this is built for it.

Fixtures and results arrive on their own.

Kick-off times, lock countdowns and results come straight from the live feed. You are not rebuilding a grid because a knockout tie went to penalties at half past midnight, and you are not the person checking 104 results by hand.

Groups make a big competition feel small.

Split the field by office, branch, department or county. Each one runs its own standings alongside the overall leaderboard, so the person sitting 200th is still top of their floor. That is what keeps people predicting in the third week.

Your brand, all the way through.

Paid plans ship full white-label across every screen, every email and every notification. Pro and above add a custom domain and a custom email sender, so the tournament lives at your address and reads as yours from the first group game to the final.

Questions sweepstake organisers ask.

Does Fanzava run a sweepstake with names drawn at random?: No. A sweepstake in the Irish and British sense, names pulled from a hat against a field of runners, is not a format Fanzava ships. We run prediction leagues and knockout brackets, where people make predictions and those predictions score. If the random draw is what you want, keep doing it on paper and run the prediction league alongside it.
What should we run for the World Cup instead?: Match-by-match predictions across the group stage, then a bracket for the knockouts. The group stage is 72 matches, which is three weeks of daily engagement a bracket cannot reach, and the bracket then gives the knockout rounds a proper scoring shape. Both run in one branded hub with automatic fixtures and results.
Why does a sweepstake work for the Grand National but not the World Cup?: Field size and duration. The National is a maximum of 34 runners settled in a single afternoon, so nobody is eliminated early and the whole thing resolves before the room's attention does. A 48-team tournament across 104 matches removes most of your players at the group stage and then asks them to care for another three weeks.
Can we still do the paper draw as well?: Absolutely, and most organisers should. The draw is a genuinely good thirty seconds and it gets people signed up. It just is not a four-week competition. Use it as the launch moment for the prediction league rather than as the competition itself.
Is there any money involved?: Not in Fanzava. No entry fees, no prize money, no odds and no wagering. It is deliberately not a betting product, which is what makes it approvable in a workplace, a school or a GAA club where a cash sweepstake would not be.
What does it cost to run one?: Plans start free, with the free plan covering 25 players and one competition at a time. Paid plans are billed in euro, and the pricing page carries the full breakdown of what each plan includes.

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