Premier League office sweepstake, or the season-long version

A Premier League office sweepstake is the easiest workplace competition to start. Twenty clubs, twenty slips, one hat, and within ten minutes everybody in the building has something to shout about on a Saturday. Nothing else recruits an entire office that quickly.

The classic random draw, and its one flaw

Every entrant draws a club at random, the club that finishes highest wins the prize, and that is the game. The whole competition happens in the ten minutes of the draw. Once the slips are out, nobody makes another decision all season.

The maths makes it worse. Of the twenty clubs in the hat, perhaps four can realistically win the league, and by mid-December the title race is usually down to two or three. Three quarters of your office is holding a slip that cannot win anything, in September. They do not stop caring because they dislike football. They stop caring because the game they entered is already decided.

That is fixable without abandoning the draw. Add prizes that are still live in April: the lowest finisher, the biggest climb from last season's table, the club that scores most. Two or three extra prizes keep most of the room in contention and cost nothing.

Sweepstake against predictor

The alternative is a predictor: instead of drawing one club in August, everyone predicts results through the season and the points build a table. It asks a little more once a week and gives back a competition that is alive in March. Plenty of offices run both.

Running it for a remote team

A hat does not work over video, and a spreadsheet of who drew whom is the fastest way to make people suspect the draw. Draw live on a call with the camera on, or run a random allocation everyone watches happen once. Post the full list of entrant and club immediately, before a ball is kicked. Then put every update in the channel people already read, rather than a document somebody has to remember to open.

For a predictor the same rule decides everything: it has to come to people. A card that arrives as a direct message before kick-off gets answered. A website that has to be visited before Saturday does not.

Legality in 60 seconds

In the UK, a sweepstake where people pay in and the money is paid out to a winner is a lottery, and workplace lotteries sit inside a specific set of rules in the Gambling Act. Keeping the thing free to enter, with a prize that has no cash value, avoids the question altogether, which is why most offices land there. What the work lottery exemption actually requires, and where remote teams trip over it, is set out in the office sweepstake rules for the UK. This page is not legal advice.

The season-long version

This is what we build. You run one command in a Slack or Google Chat channel and everyone in that channel joins. Before each match the bot sends a private card: tap the result, choose a scoreline, lock it in. Nothing is visible to anyone else, so a colleague who knows nothing about the league is never exposed for guessing.

Points come off one ladder, and the tiers are nested:

• 3 points for the correct result, home win, away win or draw.
• 5 points if the goal difference is right as well.
• 8 points for the exact score.
• +2 points when the winner you backed sat at least six places below its opponent in the table at kick-off. Maximum ten.

Every fixture is worth the same, so a Tuesday night at Burnley counts exactly as much as a title decider. The full ladder, including how the other competitions score, is on the scoring page.

A league pick will not lock without a scoreline, and that rule came out of a World Cup semi-final. Of the 1,380 players who predicted that match, 243 called the exact 1 to 2 score. Far more people get a scoreline right than we had assumed, and the one-tap lock-the-result shortcut was quietly costing them those points. It was never what somebody rushing on a phone meant, so league pools ask for the score.

There are two season picks alongside the weekly predictions: who wins the league, and who finishes as top scorer. They are worth 100 points each, enough to matter and not enough to decide the season on their own. The window closes at the season's first kick-off, or a week after your pool is set up if you start later, so joining in November still gets you an honest chance to pick.

Why the results arrive on a Monday

The first version of this, run through a World Cup, posted one message per match the moment it finished. EMEA offices opened Slack to four to eight stacked posts before their first coffee, and the good results were buried under the dull ones. That is where the single morning digest came from, and later the Monday reveal.

So nothing is posted to your channel on a Saturday or a Sunday. On Monday morning, on your channel's own clock, the office gets the whole weekend at once: every result with who called it, then the table with the week's biggest movers. A Monday night fixture is revealed on Tuesday morning. Anyone impatient can pull the standings themselves with a command on any day, weekend included. The product declines to interrupt; it does not withhold.

It is free for your first 5 players, with no card and no trial clock, and one payment for the season covers up to 100. The details are on the pricing page, and the Premier League page shows what the cards and the Monday reveal look like.

Run the draw in August, by all means. It is a good ten minutes. Just have something for the other nine months.