A football prediction pool is one of the best excuses to get people from different departments talking to each other, beyond meetings and emails. The only problem is when someone brings money into it and things start smelling like an HR headache. The fix is simpler than it sounds: take money out of the equation entirely.
The moment an office pool starts handling entry fees and cash prizes, awkward questions show up: who holds the money, what happens if someone doesn't pay, whether this counts as internal gambling, and who at the company needs to be told about all this. Running the pool for points only, with no cash prize at all, wipes out that whole headache and leaves what actually matters: the fun of ribbing your coworkers.
The real point of an office pool isn't to make money, it's to have something to talk about besides day-to-day work. With a public standings table within the team, the jokes naturally follow: who's stuck at the bottom, who's bragging about calling the toughest result of the week, or who's trash-talking someone from another department. All of that works just as well, if not better, without anyone putting in a single dollar.
You don't all need to be on the same team or floor: a prediction pool is one of the few activities that connects people from marketing, sales, admin, or the tech department without them sharing a single project. The shared standings become a talking point by the office coffee machine or in the Slack channel, no matter which desk anyone sits at.
Match Prophets is free and doesn't handle money or prizes of any kind, so you avoid any administrative headache: just predictions, points, and standings that update automatically, which you can check between meetings. With no limit on participants, there's room for the whole company if needed.