In Footballdle you're hunting one hidden footballer. The search box holds roughly 4,900 players from the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, Süper Lig, Saudi Pro League and MLS. The answer is always someone you've heard of, though: it comes from the 100 or so players with the most Wikipedia page views over the past year. No 19-year-old backup centre-back is ever the answer. This guide is about reaching those 100 names in as few guesses as possible.
Every guess opens six boxes:
A grey club only tells you "not this club". An arrow cuts the remaining range in half. That's why the two arrow columns carry most of the information early on.
The answer pool isn't spread evenly. Right now more than a third of it plays in the Premier League and a fifth in the Süper Lig. Over half are forwards. England is the most common nationality, and Arsenal shares the top spot among clubs. The median birth year is 1998 and the median shirt number is 10.
Open with whoever sits closest to that average. Bukayo Saka works well: English, forward, Premier League, Arsenal, born 2001, number 7. One of those four boxes has a good chance of turning green, and the two arrows split the pool down the middle.
The pool gets rebuilt after every transfer window, so the shares shift a little. The idea stays the same. Your first guess isn't meant to find the answer. It's meant to cut the pool in half.
A down arrow on birth year means an older player. The oldest names in the pool were born around 1985, so the range shrinks fast. Each time, guess someone born in the middle of what's left. Three guesses usually get you down to a window of a few seasons.
Shirt numbers work the same way with one catch. Famous players cluster on 7, 9, 10 and 11. If 10 comes back with an up arrow, the answer is most likely between 11 and 30. Numbers in the 40s, or 99, exist in the pool but they're rare. Pinning the year down first is usually quicker than chasing the number.
Once the league is green, keep every guess inside it and try a different club each time. When the club turns green you're nearly done. A squad has about 30 players, but even the biggest clubs have fewer than 10 names famous enough to be the answer. Position and number sort out the rest.
Grey nationality with a green league means a foreign player in that league. Plenty of Süper Lig answers fall into this bucket, since most of them aren't Turkish.
One trick: you can type lesser-known players purely to gather information. They'll never be the answer, but they're handy for testing a specific club and shirt number at once.
Footballdle has no guess limit, but unlimited guesses don't mean unlimited comfort in a room. First to solve gets 3 points, second 2, third 1. Solving on your first guess adds a 2-point bonus. Past 10 guesses you start losing points: 1 point on guess 11, then another point every 5 guesses.
So don't just rattle off names. Make each guess teach you something. If your friend solves it in 8 and you take 14, you lose on placement and on the penalty.
In Clubs the answer is a club. The clues are league, country, city, founding year and stadium capacity, and the last two come with arrows. The capacity arrow is especially useful, because only a handful of clubs play in stadiums over 50,000.
Crest shows a blurred, darkened club crest and gives you 6 tries. Each wrong guess sharpens the image a bit. At first look for shape and colour blobs: round badge or shield, vertical stripes in the middle? Colours survive the blur, and even "red and white shield" cuts the list a lot. If you're unsure, spend the first try on the likeliest club in those colours. The picture gets clearer on the next ones.
Footballdle is part of the daily puzzles in the lobby. Everyone gets the same player on the same day, and your streak is stored in your browser. It's a good excuse to post your guess count in the group chat every morning and see who did it in fewer.