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Random groups of 5 generator

Five-a-side teams, project pods, study groups — paste your list and get evenly sized groups of 5 in one click.

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Use case

When to use this

Five is the standard for indoor football, basketball half-court, scrum-style project pods and small case-study groups in business school. It's also a good size for a panel discussion plus a moderator.

How to use it

Step by step

  1. 1

    Paste your list

  2. 2

    Generate fives

  3. 3

    Export or send to bracket

Five-a-side football

Pair this generator with the bracket maker for a Saturday morning league: split into groups of 5, then create an 8- or 16-team bracket from the resulting team list.

Project pods

For semester-long projects, generate once and lock the groups. Export to CSV and paste into your gradebook so attendance and rotations are easy to track.

What 'fair' actually means here

When we say a split is fair we mean two specific things. First, team sizes differ by at most one — never by two — regardless of how the headcount divides. Second, in skill-balanced mode the total rating per team stays within roughly one rating point of the average. Those are mathematical guarantees of the algorithm, not marketing language. If you want to verify, generate the same input twice with different seeds: the per-team totals will land in the same narrow band each time. Pure-random mode trades that balance for surprise — useful when the ratings are noisy or the activity is recreational. Read the full algorithm description on the methodology page if you want the snake-draft maths.

Practical tips before you paste

Three small habits make the output noticeably better. (1) Strip leading numbers and bullets from your list — paste plain names, one per line, so the parser doesn't treat '1. Alex' as a name. (2) If you have ratings, append them after the name with a space, e.g. 'Alex 4'. The generator accepts integers and decimals from 1 to 10. (3) Decide up-front whether absentees should be excluded or kept as ghosts. Excluding gives tighter teams; keeping them lets you swap names back in later without regenerating. The 'Copy as text' button preserves your line order so you can edit and re-paste.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What if I have 23 people?

You'll get four groups of 5 and one group of 3. Generate again if you'd rather have leftover seats than tiny groups.

Is anything sent to your servers?

No. The team generator runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. The names you paste are kept in component memory only and are never transmitted, logged, or persisted unless you explicitly export them. Closing the tab clears the data. See the privacy and methodology pages for the technical detail.

Can I lock specific people onto the same team?

Yes. After generating, click any name to swap it with another, or use drag and drop in the team panel. For one-off groupings (siblings, carpool partners) this is the fastest path. For repeated locks across many regenerations, give the locked group a shared rating that's slightly above average and use balanced mode — they'll cluster together most of the time.

Why do I sometimes get the same split twice?

On very small inputs (under ~10 names) there are only a handful of mathematically distinct splits, so repeats are inevitable. The shuffle is cryptographically random — it's just that the space of valid outputs is small. Either add more names or accept the duplicate; either is fine.

Keep exploring

Related tools & guides

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