How to actually track your World Cup bets

The tournament starts in just over two weeks. Most bettors will place more bets in the next 40 days than in the rest of the year combined. Here's what tracking it honestly looks like — from someone who learned the hard way during Euros 2024.

By Ilgaz Incedayi · 6 min read · Published 25 May 2026

The arithmetic nobody mentions

The 2026 World Cup runs 64 matches across roughly 40 days. Three matches a day in group stage. Knockouts every day until the final. If you're a moderate bettor placing two to four bets per match day, that's between 80 and 160 separate bets across the tournament — for a lot of people, multiples of what they normally place in a typical month.

And those bets are scattered. You'll place them on three different bookmaker apps. Some on accumulators where one leg lost and you forgot to mark it. Some on prop bets you barely remember placing. Some across two countries if you travelled. Some in different currencies if you used a crypto bookmaker. Some on a Sunday morning at 2 AM after a long evening with friends.

By the final on 19 July, "did I have a good tournament?" is a question almost nobody can actually answer.

The Euros 2024 problem (and why we built Zort)

I learned this the hard way during the Euros in 2024. Luca and I were both betting weekend football across the tournament. By the round of 16 I thought I was up. By the semis I was sure of it. Then the final came and went, and a week later we tried to actually total what we'd done across the whole month.

We couldn't. Not properly. Three bookmaker apps each, partial records on one we'd left, currency conversions we hadn't tracked, accumulators that lost on one leg we'd both forgotten about. When we eventually got it together — partial, with assumptions — the real total was much worse than the story in our heads.

Not catastrophic. Just dishonest. We'd both been telling ourselves a friendlier version of the truth across a month of football we cared about. That was the moment that turned into Zort. (The longer version is in our founder note.)

A tournament is when this becomes hardest to do by hand — and most important to actually do.

Three things to do before kickoff on 11 June

1. Decide a tournament budget — and write it down

Not "I'll be sensible." A number. The total amount you're willing to spend across the tournament, regardless of how the games go. If you bet half of it by the end of group stage, that's information — you slow down for knockouts. If you bet very little of it, that's also information.

This is the single thing most bettors don't do, and it's also the single thing that prevents the "morning after the final" moment.

2. Pick one tool to put every bet into

Not three spreadsheets, not the betting history tabs on each bookmaker app, not a notes app. One place that holds the actual numbers. Zort is built for this — snap the slip with your camera, the AI extracts the odds, stake, and selections, the dashboard adds it to your tournament view. Free, every bookmaker, 160+ currencies. But the principle matters more than the tool: pick one and be religious about using it.

3. Turn on a wellness limit

This sounds boring. It's the most important one. In Zort's settings (and in most bookmaker apps), you can set a stake limit per day, per week, or for a custom period. Set one. The tournament is exactly when intensity creeps up — Croatia goes to penalties, you're emotional, the stakes get bigger. A pre-committed limit is the version of you who's making good decisions, leaving notes for the version of you who's about to make a worse one.

What "tracking it properly" actually looks like during the tournament

This is genuinely simple:

1. Snap the slip the moment you place a bet. Camera, photo, done. 5 seconds. The longer you wait, the more bets blur together and the harder it is to be accurate later.
2. Mark the outcome the moment you know it. Won, lost, cashed out. Zort calculates the effective odds and updates your P&L automatically. Don't wait until "later" — later doesn't happen during a tournament.
3. Look at the dashboard once a day, not after every bet. Looking after every match leads to chasing. Looking once a day — say, the next morning over coffee — gives you the pattern without the emotion.
4. Use the wellness alerts as a feature, not an annoyance. When the app tells you you're approaching your budget, that's the entire point.

What the post-tournament moment looks like

When the final whistle blows on 19 July, you'll be able to open Zort and see your tournament in one screen. Total stakes. Total return. Net P&L. Win rate. Your most profitable matchday. Your worst day. The teams you backed most often. The teams you should have backed less.

For most people, the numbers will be a little uncomfortable. That's not Zort's fault — that's the truth, which they'd been telling themselves a kinder version of. The point isn't to make you feel bad. The point is that the truth, once you've seen it, becomes useful. Next tournament, you bet differently. That's the whole game.

Two and a half weeks to ready yourself

Download free, scan one practice bet to confirm it works with your bookmaker, set a tournament budget, turn on a wellness limit. That's it. Whatever happens between 11 June and 19 July, you'll know the real numbers when it's over.

Not "I think I was up." Not "it kind of evened out." Not the kind story you tell yourself after months of football. The real ones.

— Ilgaz, with Luca
Co-founders, GIS Analytics Limited