Guess the Footballer

Green is an exact match. Yellow is close, and close has a fixed meaning for each column. On Nat it means the same confederation, so a French guess against a Croatian answer is yellow because both are UEFA. On League and Club it means the answer also played in the league or for the club shown. On Pos it means the next position along the line from defence to attack: defender, midfielder, winger, forward. On Born it means a birth year within two of the answer's. Grey means none of that applies.

Toward the answer. An up arrow on the birth year means the answer was born later than your guess, a down arrow that they were born earlier. The arrow stays on a yellow cell too, so a yellow 1985 with an up arrow means 1986 or 1987.

If your guess and the answer are at the same club now, or finished their careers at the same club, the Club cell is green. If not, it lists every club in your guess's career that the answer also played for, newest first, in yellow, so a Cristiano Ronaldo guess against an answer who played for Manchester United and Real Madrid shows both. Only if there is no shared club at all does it show your guess's latest club in grey. League works the same way with the leagues those clubs play in, so a yellow always names everything worth chasing.

The top flight of the country it plays in, by the name fans use: Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, MLS and so on. Monaco counts as Ligue 1, Cardiff and Swansea as the Premier League and Toronto as MLS, because that is where they play.

Because most of the pool has retired and some of it has died. An age would put Pelé in his eighties years after his death, and it would change every January. A birth year means the same thing for Lamine Yamal and for Puskás, and it places a player in their generation, which is what the clue is for.

895 players, all of them people a football fan would recognise. 492 have played in the last decade, 353 are from roughly 1990 to 2015, and 50 played before that, from Di Stéfano and Puskás to Maradona and Van Basten. It is the same list the Football Wordle uses.

No. The search box only offers players from the pool, because every guess has to be comparable on all five columns. A name it cannot find is a name the answer cannot be, so you never waste a guess on someone outside it. Accents are optional when you type: mbappe finds Mbappé and odegaard finds Ødegaard.

The clubs are the ones on the shared football list this site uses for all its football games, so a transfer gets fixed in one place and every game picks it up, the League column included. Until then both columns use the club on record. There is no shirt number column for the same reason: numbers change with every transfer, and a clue that is out of date is worse than none.

It narrows who the answer can be, and if you pick the era you watched, yes. It does not narrow the search box. You can guess anybody in the pool whatever era you picked, because a Golden player's row still tells you about leagues, clubs and nationality in a Modern round. Classic is the smallest era at 50 names, and 7 of them share no club with any other Classic player, so guessing other legends tells you nothing about where those 7 played.

No. A player is drawn when you press Start and another when you press Next, so you can play as many as you like in one sitting. A session works through the pool without repeats until it runs out.