How to use this generator
Paste your names above (one per line or separated by commas), choose the number of teams or the number of people per team, and click Shuffle Teams.
You can use your own team names instead of "Team 1", "Team 2". Enter your names in the Custom Team Names field, one per line or comma-separated. Any teams you don't name are automatically labeled "Team 1", "Team 2", and so on.
The shuffle update automatically as you type because that would mean the teams kept changing while you're still adding names, which defeats the point. Click Shuffle Teams once your list is ready, and Reshuffle any time you want a fresh random draw with the same settings.
How the shuffle works
Names are shuffled using the Fisher–Yates algorithm, then dealt round-robin into teams. This matters more than it might seem: a common shortcut — sorting a list by a random number attached to each item — is a well-documented source of biased results, where some orderings end up more likely than others depending on the sorting algorithm involved. Fisher–Yates is the standard, provably uniform way to shuffle a list, so every possible ordering is equally likely.
Keeping teams fair when the numbers don't divide evenly
23 people into 4 teams doesn't split evenly — someone has to end up with an extra teammate. Dealing shuffled names round-robin (one at a time, cycling through each team in turn) means team sizes never differ by more than one person, and which teams end up with the extra person is randomized along with everything else, not simply dumped on whichever team happens to be listed last.
Number of teams vs. people per team
These aren't the same request. "4 teams" means the team count is fixed and sizes adjust to fit. "5 people per team" means the size is the target and the number of teams adjusts — rounded up, so no team ever ends up larger than the size you asked for, even if that means the last team is a little smaller than the rest.