Round of 32
Description
Round of 32 — World Cup 2026 is a plain-English qualification calculator for the 2026 FIFA World Cup group stage. Pick a team and see exactly what it needs to reach the Round of 32. It's not a simulator — it computes every remaining permutation and gives you the definitive answer.
Details
The hard part of this project wasn't the UI, it was getting the rules exactly right. The qualification engine implements FIFA 2026 Article 13 tiebreakers using a brute-force approach: for each group it enumerates every possible remaining result (a few hundred at most), computes points and head-to-head standings precisely, solves goal-difference thresholds as inequalities, and ranks the best third-placed teams independently across all 12 groups.
On top of that engine sits a color-coded overview of all twelve groups, team-specific verdicts, best-third tracking, and a simulation mode for entering custom scorelines, with live data and an offline fallback. I built it with Next.js (App Router) and TypeScript and kept the engine framework-free so I could unit-test it thoroughly with Vitest, then deployed it to Vercel.