Football Grid (Futbolle)

Football Grid is the football version of the Immaculate Grid format, part of the Futbolle family of football puzzles. Each numbered board has three headers along the top and three down the side, generated from the date, so everyone who plays a level on that date gets the same six.

Before the first guess you choose a level, and you cannot switch it during the day. Easy uses big clubs and big football nations, with at least ten answers per cell. Normal adds managers, team-mates and major trophies, so a column can read Brazil or Played with Ronaldo. Hard brings in every trophy and award plus player traits such as goalkeeper or left-footed, with few answers per cell.

You type a player's name into the search box and pick him from the suggestions. You never choose the cell: if the player fits a square, he drops into it by himself with his photo. A miss still spends one of your nine guesses, but you can try the same cell again. Each footballer can be used only once, and your score is the number of cells you filled; at the end each empty cell shows one possible answer.

Every club in a player's senior career counts, loan spells included, while youth teams do not. Club histories come from Wikipedia career tables, about 71,000 footballers are searchable, and before a board goes out every cell is checked to have at least one valid answer. A nation header means the player's football nationality.

The grid rewards knowing transfer routes and careers over decades rather than today's squads. It can be played in English, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian from the flag menu at the top of the page.