Football Wordle

Because the answer is somebody's actual surname, and footballers are not all called Messi. The grid takes its column count from the name before you type anything, so seven columns means a seven-letter answer and no guess is spent finding that out. Fixing the length at five instead would have been closer to the original Wordle, and it would also have thrown out Haaland, Mbappé, Vinícius, Ronaldo, Zidane, Rooney and almost everybody else worth asking about. If you want the fixed-length version, the intro screen lets you pin the length and every puzzle in your run will be that long.

A guess has to be the same length as the answer, otherwise the colours line up against nothing, so every answer length needs enough names to guess from. Five to eight letters gives you between 143 and 173 candidates each, which is a game. Ten letters gives you 41 and eleven gives you 16, which is not six guesses' worth of anything. So Bellingham, Lewandowski, Ibrahimović, Aubameyang and the rest of the 258 names outside the band are in the dataset but never in the grid: there is no board at their length, which means you can neither be asked for them nor type them.

No. A guess has to be one of the 895 surnames on the list, at the answer's length, the same way Wordle only accepts real words. Without that rule the grid stops being a puzzle: you could type five vowels, then five consonants, and read the answer off the alphabet without thinking about football once. You never spend a guess finding out whether a name qualifies, because a name that is not on the list at that length is rejected as you enter it.

They come off, because the keyboard has twenty-six keys. Kanté is KANTE, Núñez is NUNEZ, Šeško is SESKO and Džeko is DZEKO. Kjær becomes KJAER, which is the substitution Danish makes itself. Names with a particle or a space close up into one string, so Virgil van Dijk is VANDIJK and Frenkie de Jong is DEJONG. The full name with everything intact is shown when the puzzle ends.

The list holds one of each, because a surname is both an answer and a dictionary entry and two players sharing one would make the second unreachable. The entry picks whoever has the longer claim and the note says who the others are. SILVA is Bernardo, with David and Thiago in the note. COLE is Andy rather than Ashley, ADAMS is Tony rather than Tyler, MULLER is Thomas rather than Gerd, WEAH is George rather than his son Timothy, and THURAM is Marcus rather than his father Lilian. Around thirty entries carry a note like that.

Both narrow which names can come up, so yes, if you pick the group you know. Modern is 355 of the 637 possible answers and is anyone who has played in the last decade. Golden is 248 and covers roughly 1990 to 2015. Classic is 34 and is deliberately small: only players still spoken about, so no filling the list out with a full-back who was famous for one afternoon in 1966. What the filters do not change is what you may type. Every guess is checked against all 895 names, so a rejected one never tells you which era the answer is in.

Yes, including the part people get wrong. Correct positions are resolved first across the whole word, then each remaining letter of your guess claims one unmatched copy of itself from what is left. So if the answer has one S and your guess has two, only one of them lights up, and if the S already in the right place is the only one, neither of the others does. Marking left to right in a single pass gives the wrong answer in exactly those cases, which is how you end up chasing a letter that is not there.

No, and that is deliberate. The player is drawn at random when you press Start, and Next player draws another, so you can play as many as you want in one sitting. A session works through the pool rather than picking with replacement, so you will not see the same name twice until you have seen the rest.

Something with three or four different letters that turn up often, and the usual advice about ADIEU or CRANE only half transfers, because surnames are not spelled like English words. Across all 895 names, A and E lead by a distance, then I, O, R and N, then L and S. X appears in six names, Q in twelve and J in forty, so a guess built on those wastes a line. The section under this one works it out properly, length by length, against the 637 names that can actually be the answer.