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They call it “the beautiful game”. They also say that about football, but I’m talking about Bracketology: a new interactive game from the Guardian that lets you plot a path to victory in this year’s men’s World Cup.

For a sense of the buzz you can get from playing it, just watch the joyful reactions of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avid football fan who tried his hand at Bracketology last week. This video of him playing it perfectly captures how you progress through our game and all the emotions that go with football. For example, you might start off trying to make geeky expert predictions before succumbing to more wishful dream scenarios. As Mamdani said as he made his final choice: “Let’s go with the heart – the heart wants what it wants.”

But before the full hearts, there were the headaches behind the scenes. A huge amount of work went into making the Guardian’s game so enjoyable and playable. “It looks beautifully simple on the surface but there’s a lot going on under the hood,” explains Petter Nitter, a product manager who works on our website and related app features.

This year’s men’s World Cup is the largest ever staged. It differs from previous championships in scale and scope, with more teams allowed to progress from the group stages to the final knockout rounds. The number of teams has been expanded from 32 to 48, and so the total number of matches almost doubles from 64 to 104.

“There are several hundred permutations in our Bracketology game because you’ve got all these different rounds and variables,” explains Petter. “Finding ways to represent that was challenging, both visually and technically. For example, when a player makes a change in one part of our game, it needs to permeate correctly all the way through. It also needs to work seamlessly across our mobile app and website.”

The work that went into gamifying the progression of the tournament also makes the World Cup easier to understand. Part of the aim was to give people a better grasp of the mechanics, shape and scale of this year’s championships.

“There are similar iterations of this kind of game out there but we’ve tried to do something uniquely Guardian here by trying to bridge the gaps in people’s understanding,” says Petter. “So it’s for the football nerds and for novices. It’s as much of an explainer piece as it is a game. We were really keen to make sure people could understand the different permutations and what happens if a team moves from second place in a group to third place, and how some of those third-place teams might progress depending on how they perform.”

Sporting events often lend themselves to experimenting with innovative formats. They are regular fixtures that are teeming with data and our coverage can be planned well in advance. “World Cups and the Olympics are like punctuation points for us, where we can think about what we can do that’s new,” says Will Woodward, the Guardian’s head of sport.

Interactive games are a natural way of making our audience part of the action. “Gamifying our digital sport coverage is something we have long endeavoured to develop, going all the way back to the London 2012 Olympics,” says James Dart, the Guardian’s digital sports editor who came up with the idea of producing a Bracketology game. “This World Cup felt like the ideal opportunity to experiment again, this time in the form of Bracketology. Historically, it’s a format more associated with March Madness college basketball, but football, with the scale of this expanded tournament, felt like it could be a good fit, too.”

The team used one of the Guardian’s annual hack days to demonstrate what they were aiming to build, courtesy of Abolade Akintunde from our product and engineering department. “It was at our hack day earlier in 2026 where we were able to deliver the proof of concept, with Abolade’s work showing just what could be done,” explains James. “And then, once we had the green light to produce the game, it was a hugely impressive, swift and collaborative effort to deliver such an innovative and original design.”

That effort involved a group of more than 25 colleagues from across the Guardian, including editors, digital designers, developers, software engineers, interactive specialists and product managers.

The work that went into creating Bracketology is just a fraction of the effort that has gone into the different elements of the Guardian’s World Cup coverage. Alongside Bracketology, the team has also produced our interactive guide to each of the 1,248 players in this year’s tournament. The Guardian has been publishing interactive player guides since the 2016 Euros, but the scale of this year’s World Cup takes things to a whole new level. “This year’s guide is the biggest single piece of content that Guardian Sport has ever produced,” says Will. “It’s longer than Great Expectations.”

The trove of information is written by local journalists with deep knowledge of each team and nation. Pulling it all together has been a huge undertaking for our sports desk in London, which started working on it in February.

Something of this size would normally be prohibitively expensive to produce. But as well as being technically innovative, the player guide also has an innovative operating model. “It’s essentially an exchange of information,” explains Marcus Christenson, our football special projects editor who looks after the player guide. “In return for writing their profiles, the contributors get access to the player profiles from the other 47 countries for their own publications. It’s a testament to the project that when we approach people in different countries, they’re always really proud to be involved.”

That deep local knowledge allows the Guardian to offer a genuinely global perspective. And as the matches begin this week, our coverage will draw on the Guardian’s formidable team of global football expertise, including Barney Ronay, David Hytner, Jonathan Liew, Sid Lowe and Jonathan Wilson. They’ll be joined by new hires in the US such as Pablo Iglesias Maurer, Jeff Rueter, Ella Brockway and Sofia Igoe.

All in, we’ll have about 30 people working directly on our daily coverage, both on and off the pitch. “We are recognised as being properly global and that’s reinforced by this incredible network of editors and writers that Marcus works with,” says Will.

Meanwhile, our much-loved podcast Football Weekly will be in the US for a sold-out live show in New York’s Bowery Ballroom, and we’ll have daily video podcasts as the tournament unfolds.

Alongside Bracketology, we are also launching an international version of our daily football puzzle game – On the ball: world stage will available on the Guardian app from tomorrow, for those who know their Vieris from their Vieiras. (You can download the app here if you don’t have it already.)

“So we have many gateways into our World Cup coverage for people to choose which element they’re most drawn to,” says Alexander Abnos, the Guardian’s senior editor for soccer in the US.

The goal is to bring people together – those who are clued-up on football and those who are just discovering the sport. It’s why Bracketology was designed for nerds and novices alike. “I had a great time doing Bracketology with Mamdani because he knows a lot about football and could make educated guesses,” says Alexander. “But equally, I’ve played it with a group of friends in a bar, some of whom knew nothing about soccer, and they really enjoyed it as well. We want to meet our audience wherever they are.”

See all our World Cup coverage here

This article is taken from the Guardian’s weekly email for supporters, sent on Tuesdays. To support the Guardian’s work on a single or monthly basis, please click here.