You only get the chance to be a World Cup manager once every four years, so enjoy it while you can and perhaps walk away with a major prize.

Free Games

Metro World Cup Fantasy Football:
Free to enter and with £20,000 in prizes to be won, this is the World Cup Fantasy Football game to play.

Works on the ISM Games premise where you have a fixed budget to draft a team of 12 players. Managers can make transfers throughout the competition to stay competitive and join a league with friends.

Code to join our league is: 49349-8824

Fantasy Premier League International:
This is where we play our Premier League fantasy football and for the World Cup you can only make teams from World Cup players based in England. You also need to select a manager (every country's manager is given).

Code to join our league is: 10006-3011

McDonald's/FIFA World Cup Fantasy Game:
You'll need a Yahoo id to play here. The Yahoo system gives points for tackles and shots on goal, so there's more to picking players than choosing goal-scorers, assists and defenders who keep clean sheets.

Picking your players is a long process, as you have to search for them, and you need to field a squad of 23.

If you want to join our league, the id is 2778 and password: bigsoccer

World Cup Predictions:
Predict the scores of all the first round matches and tables automatically update to let you know who plays who in the knockout stages. Three points for a correct score and 1 point if the score is wrong but the result correct.
You then get 4 points for each team you correctly predict to reach the quarter-finals, 6 points for the semi-finals and 10 points for the finalists.

There's another 12 points if you correctly predict the 2006 World Cup winner and $500 if you get the most points; which is doubled to $1,000 if you correctly guess the tie-breaker question.

Our league is Berlin 2006, if you want to join us.

Channel 4 Fantasy Football World Cup 2006:
Free to play, the overall tournament winner will scoop a trip to the Community Shield showdown at the Millennium Stadium. Select 11 players without worrying about budget.

Players to be selected are all in one list, which is a pain.

ntlworld Fantasy Football:
Select 11 players and a manager within your budget of 75 stars (quite hard). You choose your formation and have 3 free transfers a day during the group stage; but you can't transfer your manager.

The highest-scorer at the end of the competition wins a holiday for two in the country of the tournament winners.

Eurosport World Cup Game:
This game is all about stock prices of the World Cup football teams and is free to enter. I took a look at it and quite honestly you need to spend far too much time online to stay competitive and there's a chance that there are some price fixing cartels around with many multiple accounts.

World Cup DAQ:
The BBC have a similar share price game. Every Tuesday, the person with the highest weekly percentage gain is crowned Top Trader. The five Top Traders picked between June 13th and July 11th will be entered into the prize draw. It seems much slower to make a trade than the Eurosport game though, which at critical times could cost you dearly.

Cost to Enter

Fantasy League Classic World Cup 2006:
Costs £5 to enter with £25,000 in prizes. The manager that accumulates the most points during the tournament (9th June to 9th July) wins £10,000 cash and a holiday for two to the 2006 Beach Soccer World Cup in Brazil.

Sky Sports World Cup Fantasy Game:
Sign up for £5.95 and get 5 free transfers. Subsequent transfers cost 65p, with additional discounts for multiple transfer bundles. £25,000 first prize with many smaller cash prizes, down to 10th place.

You The Manager:
To add to the fun there's a massive £60,000 up for grabs with a monster £30,000 first prize, five Stage prizes worth £2,750 and a top Office League prize of £2,000. Select 11 players in a 4-3-3 formation from a £60M budget with no restrictions on number of players from same country. Maximum of 12 transfers. Cost per team is £5 for entry.