How to play

One match, Sunday evening. The board opens straight after the last result has had its 2 hours, and shuts somewhere between 3 and 5 days later.

Days rather than an afternoon, because the person who approves a media budget is not the person watching a countdown. A brand can be outbid on Tuesday, argue about it internally on Wednesday and come back on Thursday.

So no match running is the normal state, not a fault. Most of the week is the contest for the next one.

Nobody is told when the board shuts. Not the brands, not us: the moment is drawn by the system from the match number and a key, once, and there is no lever to pull for anybody who asks.

A published close turns five days of bidding into one minute of it. Everybody waits, nothing happens until the end, and the winner is whoever had the fastest hand rather than whoever valued the slot most. With the moment unknown, the only way to hold a place is to be holding it already, which is the price we wanted the board to find.

The close is never sent to your browser while it is still ahead, because a value in a page is a published value whether or not anything displays it. It appears afterwards, when it is history and can no longer be timed.

Whenever it falls, at least 44 hours are left before kickoff. The surprise is in the closing, not in the fixture.

Every valid offer is public for the whole time the board is open: who made it and how much. Nothing is sealed and nothing is held back, so being outbid is something you see rather than something you are told about afterwards.

The two highest offers standing at the moment it shuts are the two that play. There is no defending champion discount and no reserved place: a brand on a twelve-match streak bids for its place like everybody else.

If two offers are equal, the earlier one is ahead. Matching to the cent is rare, which is exactly why the rule exists in advance: inventing one while two companies are looking at the same number is how a board loses its credibility. Earliest-first is also the only tie-break that cannot be played. Rewarding the later offer would reward waiting and watching, which is the behaviour the unannounced close was built to remove, and a coin toss would make the result unexplainable.

The time counted is when you submitted, not when your payment cleared. Clearing is our side of the transaction and its speed is not something you control.

An offer whose payment has not cleared is shown with its amount and no standing at all. The largest number on the table need not be the one that wins, and hiding that would make the board look like something it is not.

Raising your own offer replaces it and keeps your original time, so improving a bid never costs you a tie you were already winning.

A match is one argument in three parts, and each part has its own subject. In PRODUCT the brands show what they make; in CREATIVITY, what they made of it; in CHALLENGE, one dated commitment the crowd can hold them to. A brand that brings nothing to a round shows an empty round.

The vote closes at the end of each round, and the three totals are added. The highest total wins, which means a landslide in one round can outweigh two narrow losses: the round scores are printed next to the total so that is visible rather than buried. The final segment is the proclamation and nothing is cast in it.

Level on votes, and the crowd votes once more for 15 minutes. Once only. Still level after that and the match is undecided: no winner is invented.

Free, and no account. One browser counts once per round, not once per match, because the totals are summed and three rounds drawing three different sized crowds would let the busiest one decide the match on its own.

You can change your mind while a round is running and the count follows you; when the round closes, it closes.

Nothing about a vote is for sale. Owning half the stadium does not move the count by one, and a brand that manufactures votes is out with no refund of the offer that put it there.

Seats are bought from the home page, on the flat map beside the miniature of the stadium. The tunnel and the ground outside sell in the stadium too: drag across them where they are. Either way the stadium is where you see every slot in place, yours included.

Four kinds of surface, and they are worth different things because they are seen differently. Seats in the stands are the stadium itself. Boards along the pitch are in every wide shot. Panels in the tunnel are seen by everyone walking in, one at a time and close up. Ground outside is the car park and the forecourts, seen from above.

A seat is the unit. Take one or take a whole stand, and what you buy keeps your colour, and your mark once you have uploaded one, for as long as the term runs.

One seat for one match runs from €6.41 to €30.50, VAT included. Two things move it: which district the seat is in, and how solid a block you take around it, because a compact block reads as a shape from across the bowl and a scattered line does not.

Everything opens on the single match, which is the smallest thing you can buy. Longer terms multiply from there and say so next to the choice: the same corner seat held for the season, twenty matches at a fifth off, comes to€102.48.

• Long side, lower tier×4Closest to the pitch and square-on to the stand opposite.
• Behind the goal, lower tier×2.6As close, but seen at an angle from almost everywhere.
• Long side, upper tier×2Further back, still square-on, and the largest single surface.
• Behind the goal, upper tier×1.4Far and oblique together.
• Corner×1The cheapest surface in any stadium, and this one is no different.

A business pays 2 times what a private person pays for the same surface, everywhere. The surface is worth more to somebody selling something on it.

One match, 6 matches or 20 matches. The longer terms cost less per match, and they are counted in matches rather than in weeks: a week without a match does not consume one, and neither does a fixture that is called off.

A person gets an avatar, assigned rather than chosen, and it is the same one every time. It cannot carry a trademark, which is the point: an individual is here to be present in the bowl, not to advertise in it.

A brand gets its name, its colour and its mark, and accepts the terms that come with putting a mark in front of a crowd.

100,000 seats, and every one of them is a separate thing somebody can hold. That is the whole design: the crowd is not a texture, it is the inventory.