How FootyQs works and where our data comes from

FootyQs is built around one simple idea: football careers are full of surprising connections, and connections make brilliant puzzles. This guide explains how our games work, where the underlying data comes from, and why we are open about both its strengths and its limits. We think a little transparency makes the games more enjoyable and more trustworthy.

The games

Every FootyQs game is a different way of exploring the same rich web of players and clubs.

• Two Clubs, One Player asks you to name a player who turned out for two chosen clubs. It is the purest test of connection knowledge and a great place to start.
• Guess the Player gives you three clubs and challenges you to identify the single player who represented all of them.
• The football grid is a puzzle of intersecting clues, where each cell asks for a player who satisfies two conditions at once, such as playing for one club and another. Our grid strategy guide has tips for cracking the tricky cells.
• Check the Player lets you look up a career and see the clubs a player has represented, which is a superb way to learn new connections you can reuse.

Where the data comes from

Behind these games sits a large dataset of players, clubs and the careers that link them. That data is sourced from Wikidata, a free, community-maintained open knowledge base run by the Wikimedia Foundation, the same organisation behind Wikipedia.

Wikidata stores structured facts rather than free-flowing prose. Instead of an article about a player, it holds tidy statements: this person is a footballer, they played for these clubs, in these years, in these positions. Because the information is structured, we can query it, organise it and turn it into puzzles. It is this machine-readable quality that makes Wikidata such a good fit for a games site like ours.

How we turn it into games

We take the relevant slice of Wikidata, focused on footballers and the clubs they have represented, and process it into a form our games can use quickly. When you ask for players shared by two clubs, or fill a grid cell, we are searching that processed dataset for careers that overlap in just the right way. The heavy lifting happens ahead of time, so the games themselves feel fast and responsive.

Why Wikidata is a strength

Choosing an open knowledge base brings real advantages, and they are the main reason we use it.

• Breadth. Wikidata covers an enormous range of players and clubs, spanning countries, leagues and eras far beyond what a small team could ever compile by hand.
• Openness. The data is free and openly licensed, which means we can build on it responsibly and be transparent about our source rather than hiding it away.
• Community upkeep. Thousands of volunteers around the world keep Wikidata current, adding new players and correcting errors, so the dataset keeps improving over time.
• Consistency. Because everything is stored as structured statements, connections between players and clubs are expressed in a uniform way that our software can reason about.

Why it also has limits

The same qualities that make Wikidata great also come with trade-offs, and we would rather be upfront about them.

• It is crowd-sourced. Entries are written and edited by volunteers, so coverage varies and the occasional detail may be incomplete or need refining.
• It can lag real life. A very recent transfer might not be recorded straight away, so the newest moves can take a little time to appear in our games.
• Coverage is uneven. Well-known players in major leagues tend to be thoroughly documented, while lower-league or historical players may have thinner records.

None of this undermines the fun; it simply means the occasional connection may be missing or arrive a little late. We explain this in more detail in our companion guide, why some players are missing from our games.

A dataset that improves over time

One of the nicest things about building on an open knowledge base is that it keeps getting better without us doing anything. As volunteers add fresh transfers and fill gaps in Wikidata, those improvements naturally flow through to FootyQs when we refresh our data. In a sense, the whole football-loving community is quietly helping to make our games richer.

Play and explore

Now you know what is under the bonnet, the best next step is to play. Pick two clubs in Two Clubs, One Player, tackle the grid, or simply browse a career with Check the Player and watch the connections reveal themselves. To learn more about who we are and what we are building, visit the about page.