Football Grid

Pick the square, then type a player. The name counts if the player played for the club on the left of the row and for the club or national team at the top of the column. You have 9 guesses for the nine squares. A wrong name uses one up and leaves the square open, and each player can fill only one square per grid.

Any spell with the first team, however short, loans included. Sergio Agüero's half season at Barcelona counts, and so does Ismaël Bennacer's single League Cup game for Arsenal. Youth and reserve sides do not.

Because the player's record on this site does not have both the row and the column. When a name is marked wrong, the search panel marks which half failed, the row or the column, and lists the clubs and nationality the grid checked it against. If a spell is missing from that record, the contact page is the place to say so, and the fix reaches every football game on the site.

23 clubs and 11 national teams, the ones with the most players in the pool. The clubs are Barcelona, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Arsenal, Inter Milan, Liverpool, Juventus, AC Milan, Bayern Munich, Manchester City, PSG, Tottenham Hotspur, Roma, Ajax, Atlético Madrid, Monaco, Napoli, Borussia Dortmund, Newcastle United, Everton, West Ham United and Benfica. The countries are England, France, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Argentina, Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and Croatia. Rows are always clubs. Columns are clubs or countries, with at most two countries in a grid, because two countries would never share a player.

Yes. A square only makes it into a grid if at least 3 players in the pool fit it, and a grid is only used if nine different players can fill its nine squares at once. Some squares have three answers and some have more than twenty.

Today's grid is the same for everyone on the same day, and it changes at midnight on your own clock. Its number counts the days since the first grid, and the shared result carries it so the person you send it to knows which grid you played. The Random grid button deals a new one whenever you like, and those are shared without a number.

Anyone in the pool of 895 players the site's football games share, from Puskás and Di Stéfano to Lamine Yamal. The box only offers names from that pool, so a player outside it cannot be entered. Accents are optional: mbappe finds Mbappé.

No. A rarity score needs to know what everyone else picked, which means sending every guess to a server. This site does not collect guesses, so the score is the number of squares you filled. When the grid ends, each square shows how many players in the pool would have fitted it.

No. Nothing is stored in your browser, so closing or reloading the page starts the grid again from empty. Today's grid will be the same one when you come back to it on the same day.