Post-World Cup 26 development update

The 2026 World Cup is over and so too is Fantasy UTD’s WC26 game.

Hundreds of users joined WC26 leagues and played our game over the course of the tournament. It was such fun to see so many people building teams and creating and joining leagues.

Fantasy UTD remains a work in progress. We always intended this to be an experimental process. Our aim is to build the next generation of fantasy soccer and it will take time to get that right.

We made real progress with our WC26 game. Some new features represented a big step forward. Some other things, however, didn’t work so well.

Let’s run through some things…

Agent bidding

Our biggest new feature for the World Cup was Agent and by the majority of accounts it was a popular addition to the game.

This is a feature that permits users to make up to 15 blind bids before the transfer deadline. The value of these bids are hidden to other users until after the transfer deadline passes when bidding concludes.

Agent gave users a useful tool to strategize their bidding. We saw that most users placed hidden bids for high-value players, giving them a core to build around once the transfer deadline passed.

After that, users would most commonly use the remainder of their budget to pick up lower value players and negotiate with other users for players before the start of the gameweek.

This worked exactly as intended and helped prevent the number of incomplete teams we saw after the transfer deadline at the start of the 2026 MLS season.

From a technical point of view, it also helped to prevent our servers from being overwhelmed by traffic as was the case for periods of the MLS 2026 transfer deadline.

DM negotiating

Another new feature for our WC26 game gave users the ability to negotiate transfers through DMs with other users.

This proved to be another popular addition as users were able to thrash out a price for a player between themselves.

Playoffs

It became apparent once our WC26 game moved into the playoff part of the format that there were some flaws.

The elimination of IRL teams after each stage of the World Cup was problematic in that a lot of users weren’t aware that eliminated players in their team had to be sold for their budget to be reimbursed.

We manually removed eliminated players and reimbursed users, but a better solution is required going forward.

Another issue was the cadence of the World Cup and how little time there was between rounds for users to buy and sell players. There wasn't much buffer to make changes.

If we’re honest, we’re not sure this format of fantasy soccer is a great fit for playoffs. However, we have ideas on how to fix this for the future, although not for the MLS playoffs which will use the same playoff format as our WC26 game.

We’ll keep our powder dry on future changes for now. There's a lot being developed in the background at the moment.

What we’re doing next

While progress hasn’t been linear at times, Fantasy UTD is undoubtedly heading in the right direction.

We knew the scale of the challenge we were taking on when we started this project. Developing the next generation of fantasy soccer was never going to be easy.

However, 2026 has been extremely useful for determining some of the things we should double down on, some of the things that require improvement and some of the things that should be abandoned.

We have already started work on our plans for 2027. We’re extremely grateful for our community of committed users who continue to shape our platform.