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2018 World Cup Sweepstake

The 2018 World Cup is very nearly here! Kicking off on 17th June, this time of year is a great opportunity to book a holiday break in the UK. Whether you wish to celebrate the World Cup event with your friends and family or wish to escape from it, there's a Staycation holiday cottage waiting to be discovered!

And even if England let you down in the coming months, you could still come away from this summer's tournament a winner by taking part in a World Cup sweepstake. With this in mind, we thought we’d share our World Cup 2018 sweepstake rules!.

Overview

Our family sweepstake is a serious business! We have 32 places between 4 families - ie 8 teams per family - with each member putting in the princely sum of £1.50 (ie £48 altogether). It’s just a bit of fun, but you can raise the stakes as you wish – we have a lot of students in our sweepstake so we keep the cost down!

Each family decides on a name for their sweepstake team. This year our family team is "Murder on Deschamps Floor", paying a nod to France's manager (plus it's the only team we've drawn with a chance!). You can play as a team group, splitting any prizes and enduring the fines together, or as individual members within the team.

You could split the draw in half according to world rankings, to give each team four teams that are quite decent, but we just let nature take its course. There are prizes aimed at the lower end teams as I’ll explain below, as we operate on a list of prizes and fines.

The Draw

Get everyone together for the draw – whether a family or friends get together or an office sweepstake at lunchtime. Of course, it’s not always easy to get everyone together – we do a family Skype chat whereby one member of each team chooses a number in turn. The teams have been randomly allocated numbers. We have one member who organises everything - a trusted family member (do they still exist?) whereby you know it’s all bona fide! You can click on this link for a kit that you can download, print and use for your sweepstake.

The Prizes

Here is our suggestion for prizes, based on our £1.50 per player (£48)
Winner £12; Runner-up £9; Third place £6; Fourth place £3
Team scoring the earliest goal £3
Team conceding the most goals in group stage £3
Tournament top scoring player £3
Team waiting longest to score first goal in the finals £3
Most yellow cards per game (red=2 yellows) ** £3
Fair Play trophy (or not) £3

The Fines

Penalty* conceded £1
Missed penalty* £1
Sending off ** £1
Conceding in 23rd minute £1
Sent home early £3
* Excluding penalty shoot outs
** including coaches and managers

Prizes from the Fines Fund!

Magic Number = 61 (50% of income from fines)
Whistle test (50% of income from fines): Yellow card 1 point; Red card** 3 points; Penalty* 3 points

The Referees

Even the refs don’t get off scot free in our family sweepstake. Just like the teams, each ref is allocated a number and each player chooses a number for their ref when it is their turn to choose a team. Why, you ask! Well, there’s a prize for the referee with the most sendings off, bookings and penalties. You have to exclude four of them, since you only need 32, but one of them has excluded himself by being banned for match fixing. Good old Fahad Al Mirdasi! We’ll also drop one of the USA refs, as they have two, but we’ll leave the rest to chance.

The Wall Chart

We also make a wall chart with personal photos – these can be on a theme if you like! We usually submit quirky images to the organiser who emails it to us once complete. Here is an example of our Euro 2016 chart (the World Cup 2018 chart hasn’t been done yet!)

You can click on this link to the BBC’s World Cup fixtures page.

We hope you found this guide useful, and can get some inspiration for your own World Cup 2018 sweepstake. Good luck everyone!

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