About 10 minutes into building his Excel model, Michael Jarman was stumped. The spreadsheet he had put together to simulate a battle between two warring armies was giving him all the wrong outputs, and the vertical formatting he had chosen for the model was throwing him way off course. 

On a normal day at his job as the head of model development for a consultancy in Toronto, Jarman could just rework the sheet and run the calculations again. But this was the final round of the Financial Modeling World Cup Open, and the 30-minute time limit meant the clock was not on his side.

In the end, the fatal flaw in Jarman’s model allowed his opponent, Australian Andrew Ngai, to coast to victory, 734–280. As the early morning sun rose over Oceania, Ngai succeeded in calculating the damage meted out to hundreds of imaginary infantry units, archers and knights over multiple rounds of battle, earning him this year’s championship title.

“Obviously, it’s not going to be your neatest, best-practice modelling,” Jarman said in an interview with The Logic several days later. “Debugging your own work in 20 minutes under time pressure, knowing you’re falling behind, is very stressful.”

That even competitive spreadsheet modelers like Jarman can be tripped up from time to time may come as a relief to the legions of analysts, consultants and accountants who spend the bulk of their workdays in Microsoft Excel, doing calculations within its infinite, alphanumeric grid. Almost no one in the world can work the software’s functions and formulas more deftly than he can.

The 27-year-old will finish the year in sixth place in the FMWC’s global ranking, which takes into account contestants’ performance in monthly Excel competitions since January. He is also a former World Cup champion, having won first place in 2018.

But it’s this year’s FMWC Open, whose finals were held on Dec. 11, that has made him a bonafide celebrity even outside the relatively small world of competitive spreadsheet modelling. For the first time this year, the annual tournament was broadcast live, with hundreds of thousands of people watching him compete via YouTube and the app of U.S. sports broadcasting giant ESPN.

“For those two hours, Michael Jarman was famous in this crowd,” said Bill Jelen, also known as “MrExcel,” a consultant and author of dozens of books on the software who served as one of the hosts for the event.

As Jarman plugged away at his spreadsheet, a team of three commentators analyzed his decisions in real time, and rabid fans calling themselves the “Jarmy Army” cheered him on in the comments section. Nicknames spawned and circulated in the chat: Jar Jar Pinks, Jeneral Jarman, the King of the North.

The FMWC Open’s e-sports format is more commonly reserved for popular online multiplayer games like Fortnite and League of Legends, and less so for office software. But the tournament’s organizers think Excel has the potential to become a streaming sensation. 

“If you add the right amount of production to this, it becomes watchable, it becomes exciting,” said Max Sych, the event’s chief operating officer.

Most of the challenges are designed by Andrew Grigolyunovich, the founder of AG Capital, a consulting firm based in Latvia. The company oversees the FMWC Open as well as its regular season competitions, with a handful of employees like Sych helping out with logistics—including testing out the cases beforehand.

Rather than having contestants build models just to calculate cash flows or profits, as they might in their day jobs, the organizers added a twist by giving them challenges that looked radically different from Excel’s typical finance uses. In one round of the championship, contestants were asked to simulate a version of the game Battleship in Excel; in another, they had to find their way through a fictional city composed of spreadsheet cells.

This year, the organization also started working with Microsoft, which helped promote the event and donated the US$10,000 in cash prizes that were distributed to the top finishers. 

“We’re incredibly thrilled to see [Excel] brought in front of hundreds of millions of e-sports fans around the world,” Microsoft spokesperson Meggie Stone said in an email. “The level of gameplay was super high, with some of the players making it to Level 3 and Level 4 (out of five levels) in some of the cases.”

When he isn’t performing in spreadsheet-modelling competitions, Jarman works for Operis, a consultancy with offices in Toronto and London that provides project-finance services such as auditing and accounting. 

Among the projects he has audited is TC Energy’s $5.4-billion Coastal GasLink pipeline, the high-profile natural-gas line whose construction in British Columbia led to cases before the B.C. Supreme Court and sparked ongoing protests among Indigenous groups across Canada.

A native of Birmingham, U.K., Jarman studied economics at the University of Cambridge before moving to Canada in 2017. It wasn’t until he joined Operis that he began honing his Excel skills in earnest—trained in part by a colleague, Hilary Smart, who took home the top prize in a previous iteration of the tournament in 2013.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my first manager’s, like, world champion in my job,’” Jarman said. “That’s pretty intimidating.”

Jarman first entered the competitive circuit several years ago, when the events were held in person under a different organizer. Under AG Capital, the Financial Modeling World Cup took more steps to enhance the appeal for viewers, moving the FMWC Open online and adding live commentary and a head-to-head format for competitions.

Looking ahead, AG Capital has big plans for the FMWC: aside from running the championship every year, it hopes to tap into its network to offer consulting services from top-ranked Excel pros. The group is also using its experience devising challenges to provide a testing service for businesses looking to measure job applicants’ Excel skills.

Jarman, for his part, is glad to have established himself as a prominent figure in the growing e-sport. Asked whether he might some day consider a side hustle as a streamer on a popular e-sports site like Twitch, Jarman said he wouldn’t rule it out, provided the interest is there from fans.

“My friends will tell you I’m one of the least coordinated people in the world—I cannot play any physical sport,” Jarman said. “Now I have thousands of people watching me build spreadsheets, which is a bit surreal.”