I am the Excel world champion

A report from Theguardian says Diarmuid Early grew up in Waterford and first used Excel at university in Cork as a workaround for Mathematica, using it to generate prime and Fibonacci numbers. He later worked at a London consultancy, became the go-to person for Excel questions, and moved to New York to work at a bank, where a colleague told him about the ModelOff competition in 2013.

He won ModelOff before the competition ended in 2019, and later won the Financial Modelling World Cup twice as organisers made the events more visual and theatrical with head-to-head battles, a real-time leaderboard and YouTube coverage. The competition was rebranded as the Microsoft Excel world championship, ESPN began broadcasting it live, and by 2023 the final was held in Las Vegas in an esports arena.

By 2025 the final had an electric atmosphere with about 500 people in the crowd; Early says some theatrics, such as a wrestling-style belt and a glowing “hype tunnel”, are odd but effective.

United States, Las Vegas