🏆 THE WORLD CUP FANTASY IS OVER

🏆 THE WORLD CUP FANTASY IS OVER — AND A MADMAN WON IT

Right. Grab a seat. The dust has settled on a month of football, 104 matches, one very sore France side, and 64 of you lot pretending you knew ball. Spain are world champions. Argentina are runners-up and inconsolable. And somewhere, @daverick is grinning like a man who found a tenner in his old jeans.

Because @daverick didn't just win our first-ever World Cup Fantasy. He lapped the field — 4,822 points, over 300 clear of second. In a contest of 64, that's not a win. That's a lecture.

The winning card (or: how to be right by being wrong)

Here's the bit that'll do your head in. @daverick's single biggest earner? Argentina, on a ×16 multiplier — 960 points. The team that lost the final. He strapped his heaviest weapon to the one nation that came up short on the last night, and it still out-scored everything else on his card. That's the beauty of this thing — Argentina battered their way to the final scoring for fun, and second place still pays.

The rest of the card was ruthless:

Team	Mult	Points
🇦🇷 Argentina	×16	960
🇪🇸 Spain (champs)	×14	798
🇫🇷 France	×15	780
🏴 England	×13	689

All four semi-finalists. Top four multipliers. Those four picks alone = 3,227 points, two-thirds of his entire total. That's not luck. That's a man who read the tournament and then had the stones to back it.

Was it a flawless card? Course not. He had New Zealand on a ×3 who repaid the faith with two defeats, a draw, and the concession of five goals in one sitting — a whopping 15 points. And Bosnia on a ×1 doing Bosnia things. But that's the genius of the multiplier system: put your duds on the low numbers and they can't hurt you. @daverick wasted nothing where it counted.

Winner's cheque: 6,000 MEDALS + 300 HIVE. Buy the lads a round, you've earned it.

The podium

• 🥇 @daverick — 4,822 — 6,000 MEDALS + 300 HIVE
• 🥈 @rajpootg — 4,513 — 2,500 MEDALS + 125 HIVE
• 🥉 @acidyo — 4,482 — 1,500 MEDALS + 75 HIVE

Special mention to @acidyo, who came into the final weekend in 5th and climbed onto the podium on the last two games alone — he was holding both finalists on big multipliers and this came to a head later in the tournament when he was doing big numbers. Timing is everything. His tinfoil helmet papperazzi will have a field day with this.

"How in God's name was this scored?" — the rules, for the confused

We had a one or two of you sliding into the comments going "I don't get how my points work." Even when we explained it (twice). Here it is, one more time, in plain English:

Step 1 — build your 16. Four pots, four teams from each. No loading up on the giants; you had to spread it.

Step 2 — rank them 1 to 16. Every multiplier used once. This is the whole game. Get your big numbers on teams that go deep.

Step 3 — rack up points. Each team earns, every match:

• Win = 3, Draw = 1, plus +1 for every goal they score (90 minutes only — no cheating with extra-time worldies).

Step 4 — the knockout jackpot. Go deep and the bonuses stack up:

Round reached	Bonus
Round of 32	+2
Round of 16	+3
Quarter-final	+4
Semi-final	+5
Runner-up	+6
Champion	+7

The bonuses are cumulative — a champion banks all of them.

Step 5 — multiply the lot by that team's number. A champion on your ×16 is a small fortune. A champion on your ×1 is a participation medal.

Tie-breaker: you called the total goals of the tournament. @daverick guessed 248. Cool as you like.

And once a team's out, they're out — they keep the points they banked, but the well's dry. (You could watch this happen live on the leaderboard right to the end, which was half the fun and half the heartbreak.)

The man who built the machine — @fullcoverbetting

None of this happens without @fullcoverbetting, who dreamt up this whole pots-and-multipliers format in the first place. Mate — take a bow. It was a belter of a contest and it's going in the vault for future tournaments.

And because he's a gentleman (and clearly a better designer than he is a fantasy manager — he finished a very respectable 8th in his own game 😏), @fullcoverbetting is putting up a bonus MEDALS prize of his own... for whoever finished 25th.

That, my friends, is @palomap3 on 3,946 points. Not first. Not last. The beating heart of mid-table, immortalised forever. Congratulations palomap3 — you have achieved perfect adequacy and it has paid off. There's a MEDALS prize coming your way for being gloriously, precisely average. Never let anyone tell you the middle of the pack doesn't matter.

That's a wrap

64 entries. 104 games. One champion, one nearly-man, and one 25th-placed legend. The contest stays open for a week so you can pick over the wreckage of your own card and figure out where it all went wrong — prizes get paid out on the 26th.

That's the first World Cup Fantasy in the books. It won't be the last.

Contest prizes will be paid out on the 26st to make sure there are no conflicts or if players want to recheck their scores , hit us up below. With 64 entrants we thank all of you for entering and we really appreciate it.

Pure sports. Real rewards. See you at the next one. ⚽

Next up we have a huge one for you. @talesfrmthecrypt is in his lair coming up with ways to make the Hive FPL better for next year and we are currently testing The Football Exchange. You will see it in the Contests section and it is currently passing the various edge tests swimmingly. Basically we are going to build a layer on top of Hice FPL where we can buy and sell players when they are performing /underperforming. The winner will be the user who makes the most MEDALS at the end of the season. This will be a big one and hopefully will put Sportsblock on the map. Your support is crucial.