Pick 4 players. Score the World Cup.

Your 4

You pick four players— that's your squad. No bench of 15, no positional quotas, no formation puzzle. Tapers to two players for the climax (SF and Final).

Pool: the 48 World Cup nations. A player appears via his nation; goals and assists score the same wherever they fall in the Round. Goalkeepers don't appear in the picker — rate is a goals-and-assists multiplier and keepers don't contribute meaningfully there.

If a player's nation is knocked out or idle in a Round, the picker hides them and they score 0 if they're still in your 4 — one nation, one match per Round.

The rate

Every player has a rate— points per goal or assist this Round. It's a longshot model: high rate means an unlikely contributor paying a big premium, low rate means an expected one paying cheaply. Opposite polarity to most fantasy games — the rate is the only pricing knob.

Inputs differ from the club game: the FIFA draw pot is the prior (frozen at the December 2025 draw), and in-tournament W/D/L + goal difference is the live signal. Pot dominates MD1–MD6, blends through R32 (1) and R32 (2), and is fully gone by R16 — pot is the story of the group stage, form is the story of the knockouts. The blend formula is unchanged.

Rates lock 2 hours before first kickoffof the Round and don't move until the Round closes. The rate you see at the lock is the rate you score against.

Captaincy

You choose your captain — one player from your 4 who scores via rate^exp instead of ×1.0. The exponent is set by position:

Popular captains carry a slightly lower exponent; rare captains a slightly higher one — pick-ownership shifts the exponent by up to ±0.1 over the ownership range [0, 40%]. No vice captain. The other picks score at ×1.0.

The captain locks when their own match kicks off — not when the first of your 4 kicks off. After the lock, the armband is pinned: transfer the captain out post-lock and the rate^exp is forfeit; the replacement scores at ×1.0. Forfeit by inaction: if you don't nominate a captain before the lock, the bonus is forfeit for the Round.

Transfers

Transfers cost nothing. You can rebuild your 4 every Round if you want — the only cost is the captaincy bonus you forfeit if your captain leaves after their match kicks off.

One cap, applied symmetrically to adds and removes: a player can only cross your 4's boundary while they're off the pitch. Fair game while their fixture hasn't kicked off, or while they're on the bench as an unused sub. Once they're named in the starting XI or come on as a substitute, they're frozen — locked into your 4 if they're there, locked out if they're not.

Squad-submission alignment: the Round 1 entry surface soft-opens about 9 days early, so you can build your 4 from confirmed national-team squads before first kickoff.

The 12 Rounds

A WC season is 12 Rounds, one per tournament phase. No Midw/Wknd split, no weekly cadence — the phase is the axis. The whole season fits in the fixed ~39-day envelope from first kickoff to the Final.

From T-7d before its first kickoff a Round freezes — its roster and identity are immutable from that moment. A postponed or cancelled fixture keeps its slot in the Round and scores 0; any reschedule lands in a still-unfrozen later Round instead of silently moving the pick out from under you.

Public leagues

Every team is auto-entered into four public leagues at the same time — same squad, same scores, different time windows of fast, medium and slow cadence:

One squad scores everywhere — pick well and you climb four tables at once. Friendlies and qualifiers ingest as data only; only the 12 tournament Rounds score.

Trophies & medals

When a public window closes, finishing in the top tiers earns a trophy of the corresponding rank — one trophy per closed window, the highest tier you qualified for.

WC trophies keep the classic cup shape but are stamped with a WC monogram instead of D/S/M; they share Gold/Silver/Bronze tier rows with club trophies in your cabinet. Private leagues award medals by finishing position instead of percentile (Gold = 1st, Silver = 2nd, Bronze = 3rd), with Silver and Bronze unlocking as the league grows.

Private leagues

Private leagues are invite-only filtered views of the four WC windows — same scoring, leaderboard narrowed to your invitees. A league can track any subset of Round / Group Stage / Knockouts / Tournament; the default is all four.

Medals stack into a lifetime record within each league: Gold = 3 pts, Silver = 2 pts, Bronze = 1 pt. Ranked by total points, ties broken by gold count → silver → bronze — quality over quantity.