Look, we need to talk about something utterly bonkers: the fact that you can now watch the world’s No. 1 spreadsheet competition on ESPN, live from the same Las Vegas arena that hosts League of Legends tournaments, and get betting odds from actual bookmakers. And you know what? The Excel World Championship 2025 is going to be glorious.
The Excel World Championship 2025 (officially the Microsoft Excel World Championship or MEWC) is happening December 2-3 at the HyperX Arena in the Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas. And if you think Excel is boring, you’re not only WRONG, but you haven’t seen 12 galaxy-class finance professionals running through a glowing hype tunnel while an announcer screams their names like they’re UFC fighters.
This year, the event is proudly sponsored by Datarails, the FP&A software solution for Excel users. This article explains everything you need to know about the Super Bowl of Spreadsheeting.
The Origin Story: How a Latvian CFA Turned Excel Into an Esport
This whole beautiful, nerdy spectacle exists because of Andrew Grigolyunovich, a Latvian chartered financial analyst who looked at the discontinued ModelOff financial modeling competition and said, “I can make this better and way more entertaining.” In 2020, he founded the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC), and by 2021, the Microsoft Excel World Championship was born.
Here’s what makes Grigolyunovich brilliant: he understood that 800 million people use Excel every single day. That’s not a typo. Eight. Hundred. Million. This isn’t some niche software. It’s the most ubiquitous business tool on the planet, second only to email. Every finance bro, data analyst, FP&A professional, and small business owner – united by those beautiful green-and-white cells.
And Grigolyunovich realized: if people are spending 40 hours a week in Excel, why not celebrate the masters?
The Format: Knockout Rounds, Time Pressure, and Pure Mental Warfare
The path to the Las Vegas finals is grueling. Here’s how the Excel World Championship 2025 breaks down:
The Road to Las Vegas (January-October): Throughout nine monthly online battles, competitors have 30 minutes to solve creative Excel puzzles (called “cases”) that test everything from XLOOKUP and Power Query to good old-fashioned logical thinking. Top performers from each battle earn spots in the main event.
Qualification Round (September 27, 2025): With regional qualifying across five continents (Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, North America, and South/Latin America), this year’s competition format expanded massively: 256 competitors advanced to the playoff rounds (up from 128 in previous years).
Playoff Rounds (October 11 & 18, 2025): The 256 qualifiers faced off in bracket-style elimination battles, with seeding based on their “Road to Las Vegas” rankings. After multiple rounds, only 16 competitors earned direct entry to the Las Vegas finals, while 40 others qualified for Day 2 matches.
Last Chance Qualification Round (December 1, 2025): This is where legends are born. Anyone can show up in Las Vegas with their laptop and compete for the 15 remaining spots in the Day 2 competition. Case in point: Michael Jarman, the 2024 world champion, was eliminated during the 2023 online rounds but fought his way back through the LCQR and eventually won it all in 2024. That’s the Rocky story right there.
The Finals (December 2-3, 2025): Day 2 features 64 competitors battling to reach the final 24. Day 3 is the main event. 24 finalists in the HyperX Arena with live commentary, a 400-person capacity crowd, a 50-foot LED video wall broadcasting every formula, and elimination rounds where the lowest scorer gets knocked out every few minutes until one Excel world champion remains.
The Cases: No Finance Degree Required
Here’s what separates the Excel World Championship from corporate training: the case challenges are wildly creative. Forget balance sheets and P&L statements. You’re more likely to be helping an ice-skating monkey named Lana collect bananas on a steep hill (she can only move down and diagonally, naturally) or simulating World of Warcraft battles with 20-character avatars and complex stat-tracking.
Past cases have included:
EVE Online space combat scenarios
Pinball machine physics modeling
Cribbage card game simulations
Maze navigation using colored cells
Backgammon probability calculations
Desert island survival optimization
The 2024 finals case was a World of Warcraft simulator that required tracking health, mana, attacks, and defensive stats across multiple characters. It was so complex that it came with a seven-page instruction manual. Competitors had 30-40 minutes to build functional models using any Excel tools at their disposal: formulas, VBA, Power Query, data validation, whatever works.
The beauty? You don’t need finance knowledge. You need Excel mastery, quick thinking, and nerves of steel.
The Players: Meet the LeBron James and Kobe Bryant of Excel
Andrew “The Annihilator” Ngai (Australia)
The three-time champion from 2021-2023, Andrew Ngai is a 37-year-old actuary and director at Taylor Fry. Nicknamed “the Kobe Bryant of Excel,” he’s won more championships than anyone and is known for his calm, methodical approach. Currently ranked second in the 2025 Road to Las Vegas standings, he’s hungry to reclaim his title.
Michael “The Jarman Army” Jarman (Canada/UK)
Michael Jarman is the reigning 2024 champion, who finally broke through after finishing runner-up three years in a row. The 30-year-old British-Canadian financial consultant literally leaped out of his chair and screamed “COME ON!” when he won. He’s defending his belt and has explicitly stated his goal: win three more times to break Ngai’s record. That’s championship mentality.
Diarmuid Early (Ireland/USA)
Dubbed “the LeBron James of Excel,” the 39-year-old Irish financial consultant is a five-time ModelOff finalist and 2014 champion. He’s the heavyweight favorite, known for breaking out advanced functions like SEQUENCE mid-battle. Early emphasizes simplicity in his spreadsheet design philosophy: “Every formula you write should be doing more work.” Fewer unique formulas for maximum efficiency.
Grayson Huynh (Australia)
Currently ranked eighth in the 2025 standings, Huynh is a technical lead at healthcare provider Bupa who made it to the top eight in 2024 before admitting that the Vegas pressure got to him. Now he’s back for a shot at redemption.
Early leads the 2025 betting odds at 3/1, making him the favorite to win the Excel World Championship 2025.
The Stakes: Prize Money, Belts, and Careers
Let’s talk money. The 2025 prize pool is $61,500, distributed across multiple rounds:
1st Place: $5,000 + the championship belt (yes, an actual pro-wrestling-style belt)
2nd Place: $3,000
3rd Place: $2,000
Top finishers earn smaller prizes all the way down
But here’s the thing: the cash isn’t really the point. Competitors are playing for global recognition, bragging rights, and career advancement. Multiple competitors have landed consulting gigs, job offers, and speaking opportunities because of their Excel esports performances. Grigolyunovich himself notes that competitive Excel attracts attention from financial firms, tech companies, and consultancies looking for top talent.
The Spectacle: How Excel Became Must-Watch Television
Picture this: you’re sitting in the HyperX Arena. The lights dim. Dramatic music pumps through the speakers. 20,000 people are watching live on ESPN (17,000 tuned in last year). Twelve competitors, many wearing sponsor jerseys, sprint through a glowing tunnel onto a neon-lit stage. The MC bellows: “From Australia, weighing in at 37 years old, three-time world champion… THE ANNIHILATOR, ANDREW NGAI!”
The crowd goes wild. 400 people are screaming. The 50-foot LED screen shows every keystroke, every formula, every mistake in real time. Commentators Jon Acampora, Oz du Soleil, and Giles Male (“The Humble MVP”) provide play-by-play analysis like it’s Monday Night Football:
“OH! Diarmuid Early just pulled out the SEQUENCE function! That’s an aggressive move!”
“We’re two minutes in, and Ngai is already building a dynamic array. This is championship-level play!”
Every five minutes, the competitor with the lowest score is eliminated. The pressure is enough to crush the hull of a Romulan Warbird. The 2024 finals came down to the final 30 seconds, with Jarman clinging to his lead while Ngai attempted a Hail Mary using the RANDBETWEEN function to guess his way to victory. It didn’t work. Jarman won by 15 points.
The YouTube livestream attracts millions of views. Fans flood the comments:
“This is better than Season 8 of Game of Thrones.”
“Can this be a new Olympic sport?”
“I scout IB analyst prospects at the Excel World Cup; we are not the same.”
Controversy: Enter the AI Overlords
Here’s where things get spicy. For years, Excel esports allowed competitors to use any tools they wanted, including AI, because bots simply weren’t good enough to compete with humans. That changed in 2024.
Enter Shortcut AI, a startup that built an AI agent specifically designed to solve MEWC cases. Their bot scored over 80% on championship-level cases in about 10 minutes. When tested against living, breathing McKinsey and Goldman Sachs analysts, the AI outperformed them 89.1% of the time and did it 10x faster.
The MEWC organizers slammed down the hammer: AI tools are now completely banned from competition. You can use whatever Excel has natively (including Excel’s built-in AI features like data types and insights), but no external AI agents.
Jarman himself isn’t worried about AI replacing human competitors, or human analysts, for that matter. His take? “If we sacked all the analysts tomorrow, the company would be more profitable. But that would be dumb, because who would check the AI’s work in five to ten years?” He jokes that his future job might be “typing in six-digit authentication codes to let different AIs talk to each other.”
The philosophical question remains: can humans still compete when AI Excel agents become ubiquitous? The MEWC’s answer is clear: “Just because humans invented the car doesn’t make it less fun to run a marathon.”
The Community: Where Nerds Find Their People
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Excel World Championship is how genuinely supportive the community is. Competitors share strategies, create YouTube tutorials, collaborate on Excel tips, and genuinely root for each other off-stage, even though they’re fierce rivals in competition.
Diarmuid Early describes competitive Excel as being “like Formula One.” Athletes keep it light off the circuit, share learnings, and often grab dinner together. The Guatemalan teenager Carmina Solares, who made the top 10 globally in the youth Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship, describes the community as transformative: “I used to dream of Excel spreadsheets. I’d invent formulas in my sleep and test them when I woke up.”
Excel MVPs like Bill Jelen, Jon Acampora, and Danielle Stein Fairhurst have been instrumental in promoting the sport and training the next generation. The sport has spawned multiple local chapters, including the FMWC UK chapter that runs its own season leading to the Las Vegas finals.
Memorable Moments: The Greatest Hits
Jarman’s Redemption Arc (2023-2024): After choking in the 2023 semifinals, Jarman spent the next year preparing obsessively, even hunched over his laptop on vacation. His 2024 victory was one of the most emotional championship moments in Excel esports history.
The Last-Second Comeback (2024 Finals): With 30 seconds remaining and trailing by multiple points, Ngai filled his remaining cells with random numbers using RANDBETWEEN, hoping to stumble into the correct answers. The crowd lost their minds. It didn’t work, but the audacity!
ESPN Coverage (2022): When the Excel World Championship was broadcast on ESPN2 during “The Ocho” (ESPN’s annual celebration of obscure sports), it went viral. Mainstream sports media had to deal with the fact that spreadsheet battles were legitimately entertaining.
The Ecosystem: Beyond the Championship
The Excel World Championship 2025 is the flagship event, but the FMWC organization runs a much broader ecosystem:
The Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge (MECC): A student-focused competition with both individual and team formats. The 2025 finals run parallel to the MEWC in Vegas, with a $34,050 prize pool. Students can compete through the Last Chance Qualification Round for spots in both MECC and MEWC finals.
The Active Cell Training Camp (December 1-3, 2025): A three-day Excel training and financial modeling bootcamp in Las Vegas featuring workshops from Excel MVPs, Microsoft representatives, and world champions. Tickets range from $849 (student) and $1,249 (regular) to $2,499 (VIP).
The Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC): The more serious, finance-focused competition that runs eight stages throughout the year with a $120,000+ prize pool. These are traditional financial modeling cases: company valuations, M&A modeling, and debt structuring, designed for CFOs and FP&A analysts to sharpen their skills.
How to Watch the Excel World Championship 2025
The Las Vegas finals take place December 2-3, 2025, at the HyperX Arena:
December 2, starting at 5:00 PM PST
December 3, starting at 3:30 PM PST
Streaming: Full coverage on YouTube with live commentary
In-Person: Watch live in the arena
Follow the Season: All nine Road to Las Vegas battles are livestreamed on YouTube monthly from January through October.
Why This Matters: Celebrating the Tool That Runs the World
Excel turned 40 this year. Four decades of VLOOKUP, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and countless late nights trying to figure out why your formula returns #REF!. It’s been installed on billions of computers, powers Fortune 500 companies and corner bodegas alike, and somehow became both the most powerful and (to the uninitiated) the most infuriating software ever created.
The Excel World Championship 2025 is a celebration of the tool and, more importantly, the 800 million users who’ve mastered it, wrestled with it, cursed at it, and ultimately realized that Excel can do almost anything if you’re creative enough. It’s a reminder that spreadsheet skills aren’t just for accountants anymore. They’re for analysts, entrepreneurs, researchers, developers, and anyone who needs to turn chaos into structured data.
This sport exists because Excel users aren’t boring number-crunchers toiling in back offices. They’re problem-solvers, strategists, and yes, esports (m)athletes. They deserve their moment in the spotlight, their chance to win the championship belt, and the adulation of the cheering crowds.
So this week, when you’re watching Michael Jarman defend his title against Andrew Ngai’s comeback attempt, when you see Diarmuid Early pull off some impossible nested formula combination, when you hear 400 people screaming about XLOOKUP vs. INDEX-MATCH debates, remember: you’re watching the pinnacle of a skill that almost a billion people use every single day.
And if that’s not worth celebrating, what is?
Ready to test your skills? Registration for the Excel World Championship 2026 will open soon. Whether you’re gunning for the championship or just want to challenge yourself, there’s never been a better time to see how you stack up against the world’s best.
Visit excel-esports.com to register, practice with past cases, or learn more about the competition.
Datarails sponsors the Microsoft Excel World Championship 2025 because we believe in celebrating the tool that powers financial planning and analysis worldwide. As the competitors battle it out in Vegas, we’ll be there championing the Excel-native FP&A platform that keeps finance teams working in the environment they love.
