Office Pools Aren’t Just for Football
Quick answer: An office pool is really two separate choices — the format (how players score) and the league (what they are picking). The formats are not football inventions. Pick’em, confidence and survivor all run just as well on basketball, hockey, baseball or soccer, which means the pool your office already knows how to play does not have to end when the Super Bowl does.
Almost every group starts with football, and that makes sense. The NFL plays once a week, everyone has an opinion, and the season is short enough to hold attention. But somewhere in February the standings freeze, the group chat goes quiet, and the pool that took real effort to organise sits idle for seven months. It does not have to.
Format and league are two different decisions
This is the part most people have backwards. A “football pool” sounds like a single product, but when you create a pool you are answering two independent questions:
- What format? Pick’em, confidence, survivor, reverse survivor or single pick. This decides what players do each week and how points are awarded.
- What league? NFL, college football, NBA, college basketball, NHL, MLB, or one of the European soccer competitions. This decides which games show up on the pick sheet.
Nothing about the first answer constrains the second. A confidence pool is a set of scoring rules about ranking your picks — those rules do not know or care whether the games underneath them are played on grass in October or hardwood in January. Once you see it that way, “what should we do after football?” stops being a hard question.
The leagues you can actually run
Pocket Office Pool currently supports thirteen leagues across five sports. The full list, with a month-by-month guide to when each season runs, is on the supported sports page:
- Football: NFL and NCAA football (including the College Football Playoff).
- Basketball: NBA and NCAA basketball.
- Hockey: NHL.
- Baseball: MLB.
- Soccer: Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, MLS and the UEFA Champions League.
Scores and point spreads update automatically for the leagues we cover, so moving your group to a new sport does not mean going back to entering results by hand.
Which formats travel best to which sports
Every format technically runs on every league, but some pairings are more natural than others. Here is the honest version.
Pick’em travels everywhere
A pick’em pool is the most portable format there is. Pick winners, one point each, most correct wins. It works on a 14-game NFL Sunday and it works on a Tuesday night NBA slate. If you are moving a group to a new sport for the first time, this is the format to move them with — nobody has to learn anything.
Confidence needs a defined slate
A confidence pool asks players to rank their picks from most to least certain, which means the number of games has to be knowable in advance. That is easy in football and easy in soccer, where each club plays roughly once a week. In the daily-schedule sports it works best if the commissioner curates the slate — pick ten games from Friday’s NBA card and rank those — rather than trying to rank an entire week.
Survivor wants a weekly rhythm
A survivor pool gives each player one pick per week and eliminates them when that pick loses. The drama comes from the no-repeat rule, and the no-repeat rule needs a season long enough to run out of good teams. Football is the classic fit. The soccer leagues work well too, since each club plays about once a week from August to May. On the daily sports it moves fast, so most commissioners either define their own weekly windows or pick a different format.
Why a second pool is worth the five minutes
The hard part of running an office pool was never the software — it was getting twenty people to agree to do something together. That is already done. Once a group has played one season together, they know the rules, they know how to log in, and they know who they want to beat. Starting a second pool on a different league costs a few minutes and keeps a group that already likes each other in contact through the months when nothing is on.
It also solves an underrated problem: not everyone in an office likes football. The person who sat out the fall pool because they do not follow the NFL may be the one who runs the table in a Premier League pool. Running more than one pool is a way to widen the group rather than just extend it.
How to start one
You can run as many pools at once as you want, each with its own league, format and rules, and the same player can join more than one. Billing is per unique person rather than per pool, so someone playing in your football pool and your basketball pool counts as a single seat — which makes a second pool much cheaper than most people assume. It is free up to four players, then roughly $3 per additional player over the free four, dropping to $2 and $1 as the group grows. Details are on the pricing page.
Create the pool, choose your league, choose your format, set a tiebreaker and send the invite link. If you have not commissioned one before, the office pool overview covers the basics, and the pool hosting page explains what the software handles once picks start coming in.
Ready to go? Start your pool free — and check the supported sports page to see which season starts next.