How Total90 Works

A league is a private competition between you and your friends. You need at least 2 managers to start, and you can scale up to 12. Bigger leagues spread Racing Points across more places — see section 05 for how that math works.

League types

• Redraft — one-shot leagues for the 2026 World Cup. Everyone starts from scratch. Best for casual groups and first-timers.
• Dynasty — your squad carries forward between tournaments (Euros, Copa America, future World Cups). Built for long-term competition.

Draft types

• Snake — turn order reverses each round. The classic format. 60-second pick clock.
• Auction — every manager gets the same budget and bids on players. Maximum control, maximum stress.
• Budget — each player has a fixed cost, everyone builds within a salary cap, no head-to-head bidding.

How to invite

Once your league is created, share the join link from the league settings screen. Anyone with the link can claim the next open manager slot. You can lock the league once it's full to prevent anyone wandering in.

All managers draft live from the same player pool — every player who's been named to a final 26-man World Cup squad. We pull squads directly from Opta as soon as federations announce, so the pool is always current.

What you're drafting

• 11 starters — your active lineup for round 1.
• 5 subs — your bench, eligible to start in future rounds once you set your lineup again.
• Total roster size at the start: 16 players.

Position rules

We track Opta's registered position for every player, but you decide how to deploy them. You must field a valid formation when you set your lineup (see section 03), but during the draft itself you're free to take whoever you want.

Pro tip

Stack players from teams you think will make a deep run. Every round a team gets knocked out, you lose players. The further your picks survive, the longer they keep scoring.

Before each round you choose which of your 16 players start. You can run any formation you can dream of — 1-3-4-3, 1-4-4-2, 1-3-5-2, 1-5-3-2, whatever fits your squad.

Position flexibility

• You decide how a player slots into your formation — not their registered Opta position.
• Neymar can play as a forward or a midfielder. Your call.
• The scoring engine still pays out by the position you played him in (see section 04 for how scoring shifts by position).

Lineup lock (per-player, on minutes logged)

There is no single team-wide lockout. Each player locks the moment he logs minutes in the round — not when his country kicks off. If Tim Weah starts on the bench for the USA, you can pull him out of your XI and swap someone else in after kickoff, right up until he actually steps on the pitch. This applies to players in your starting XI, on your bench, and on the transfer market.

Once a player logs a minute, he's frozen wherever you have him — starter, bench, or unowned in the market. Everyone unlocks again when the round is over.

Forget to set a lineup? Your last-saved 11 carries over.

Every player has 200+ tracked statsfrom Opta — the same data provider ESPN, FOX, and the Premier League use. We don't use all 200. We've weighted the most meaningful ones into 7 scoring categories across 4 positions, so every part of the pitch matters — not just goals and assists.

Position weighting

The same stat is worth different points depending on the position you played a player in. A clean sheet for a defender is worth more than a clean sheet for a striker. A long-range goal scored by a midfielder pays out differently than the same goal from a forward.

The secret sauce

Exact weights and stat selections stay in-house. We're confident in our model and we're not handing it to whoever wants to clone it. What we will tell you: which stats count, and roughly how a category compares against another in magnitude.

Racing Points are the Total90 invention that keeps every team in your league alive until the very last game. Instead of accumulating raw fantasy points, your position in the round's standings earns you a fixed payout — just like Formula 1.

The system

• The World Cup is 8 rounds: 3 group stage rounds + 5 knockout rounds.
• Each round is a free-for-all. Highest fantasy score = 1st place for that round.
• 1st always = 100 points, no matter how big your league.
• The further down you finish, the fewer Racing Points you earn. Bigger leagues spread payouts more thinly.
• The manager with the most Racing Points after 8 rounds wins.

Why it matters

Traditional fantasy lets one bad round (or one bad draft) torch your season. Racing Points caps the damage — you can't fall more than 100 points behind in a single round, no matter how badly things go. Everyone's still in it at round 8.

Payout table

Every column is a different league size. Find your column, then read down to see what each finishing place is worth. 1st always pays 100.Everything else scales with how many managers you're competing against.

Example: in a 10-manager league, 1st earns 100 points for that round, 2nd earns 86, all the way down to 25 for 10th. Lose a round? You're still in the race.

As World Cup teams get knocked out of the tournament, the player pool shrinks. So we shrink your roster with it — forcing real squad decisions when they matter most.

The schedule

Translation: at the Quarters you're cutting your squad from 11+5 down to 7+1. By the Semis, you're down to 3+1. Who survives your roster is who plays for the trophy.

Cuts happen before each shrink round

When a knockout round eliminates teams, you'll see a roster cut screen before the next round locks. Pick who survives. Cut players are gone for good — you can't pick them back up later.

What this means for strategy

Drafting depth at one position is great until your bench is full of guys you have to cut. Drafting tournament longevity — players from teams that go deep — is the real edge.

Between every round there's a Transfer Window — a fixed period when every manager in the league can freely add and drop players. Think NFL Fantasy's waiver wire, but louder, faster, and without the bidding.

How it works

• No waivers.No blind bids, no priority order. The window opens, the gates drop, and it's a free-for-all.
• First come, first served.Requests land in real time and can't be processed simultaneously — the fastest manager to fire off a request wins the player.
• Add and drop freely. No restrictions on who you can pick up beyond the live player pool (eliminated nations are already gone — see Dynamic Rosters).
• The app manages and mediates every add/drop so nobody has to babysit a commissioner inbox.

The schedule (hard-coded for WC 2026)

Every window opens after the last match of its round finishes. All times Central Time (CT). The schedule lives in your league settings inside the app too.

Note: this WC 2026 schedule is hard-coded into the app. Custom per-league transfer window schedules coming soon.

Strategy

Be ready when the window opens. Have your target list built, your drop candidate picked, and your thumb hovering. Big-name players from surviving nations evaporate in seconds. The window is also chaos by design — lean into it.

From the Round of 16 onward, every match is single-elimination at the tournament level. For Total90 purposes:

• Players from eliminated nations stop scoring immediately.
• You get a roster reset window between each round.
• Extra time and penalty shootouts do count toward scoring — keepers earn for shootout saves, scorers for shootout goals.

The rule: minutes logged = locked

Locks are per-player, not per-team. The trigger is minutes logged. The instant a player steps on the pitch in the round, that player is locked — wherever you have him: starting XI, bench, or sitting in the transfer market.

Until that moment, swap freely. Example: Tim Weah is named to the bench for the USA and kickoff has already happened. As long as Weah hasn't come on yet, you can still bench him, sub him out of your XI, pick someone else up off the market, or move him around your bench. The second he logs a minute, he freezes.

We don't do live in-game subs — once a player is on the pitch, he's committed for the round. Everyone unlocks when the round ends.

Valid formations

You must field exactly 1 goalkeeper, at least 3 defenders, at least 2 midfielders, and at least 1 forward. Beyond that, build whatever you want — just deploy 11 players total in your starting XI.

The manager with the most Racing Points after round 8 (the World Cup Final) wins the league. Tiebreakers, in order:

1. Most round wins across the tournament.
2. Highest single-round raw fantasy score.
3. Highest cumulative raw fantasy score.
4. Coin flip. (We hope it doesn't come to this.)

Bragging rights are eternal. Trophies are digital. Group chats will never let you forget.