Who we are

1. What Sete a Zero is

Sete a Zero (also written 7a0) is a free in-browser game built around one very specific challenge: win a World Cup 7-0, meaning all seven matches finished without conceding a single goal. It is not a manager game, not a fantasy league, not a professional simulator. It is a hypothetical question turned into a browser game: if you could mix Pelé from 1970, Maradona from 1986, Buffon from 2006 and Mbappé from 2022 in the same starting eleven, would you close out a perfect tournament?

Each round lasts four to seven minutes. You pick eleven players from fourteen real squads dealt by the draft, play three group matches plus four knockouts, and find out whether you reached the 7-0, lost earlier, or only won by conceding. The number is called Sete a Zero because in Brazil that score is the open wound of 8 July 2014 (the semifinal against Germany), turned first into a global meme and now into a sporting target: in Spanish, the same achievement is celebrated as the 7-0 of the World Cup.

2. Why it exists

The project started in June 2026, weeks before the Canada-Mexico-US World Cup kicked off. The initial idea was to reproduce a bar conversation any football fan knows by heart: which all-time XI would you pick, and how far would it go?We were missing a site that combined real data (squads from every World Cup since 1950) with a mechanic that fits in a coffee break.

The person maintaining it is not a studio: it is a product manager with five years of experience who learned to code with AI assistance in the last year. That shows in some choices: the backend is minimalist (an edge SQL database, no dedicated server), monthly costs are below a single coffee, and every new feature is measured before and after with real data to avoid shipping noise.

3. How the challenge was designed

The target score (7-0) is not arbitrary. When the site launched on 10 June 2026, the real share of shared matches ending 7-0 was about 20% in shared runs (self-selected upward) and 2-3% across all plays. After two rounds of calibration (versions v15 and v33) the number dropped to 14-15% in shared runs and 1-2% in real plays. The medium-term target is 0.5-1%: a 7-0 should be rare enough that the moment is worth sharing, but not impossible so the attempt is still worth making.

What is tuned: the weight of each position in the rating, the home advantage (lowered to 0.10), the form variance (±14%), the rising difficulty per round (quarterfinals and the final are the largest drop-off points) and the presence of special events (VAR, heavy rain, dog on the pitch) that break the monotony. What is not done: rigging the result by picking your opponent, or inflating difficulty just to frustrate the player.

4. What we are not

• Not an official FIFA site. We have no license from FIFA, UEFA, or any national federation. The squads use public data (see Methodology), no protected player photos, no official crests.
• Not a betting site. The simulator is deterministic from a random seed that lives in your browser: no money, no commercial predictions.
• We do not collect personal data. No registration, no required email, no account. If you share a match we store the lineup, not you (full detail in Privacy).

5. Languages

The site ships in Spanish, English, Portuguese (Brazil), French, German, and Italian. Spanish is the default because the first two weeks of traffic came mostly from Argentina, Spain, Mexico, and the US Hispanic community. Translations are reviewed by hand (not machine-only) and the simulator commentary has three variants per language to avoid repetition.

6. Contact

Bugs, suggestions, press, data corrections: support@seteazero.com. We reply within one or two days.