Now and then you will be certain that a player links two clubs, only to find our game does not recognise the answer. It is frustrating, and we want to be honest about why it happens. The short version: our data comes from a huge, community-maintained open knowledge base, and like any such resource it has gaps. Here is what those gaps look like and how they can be closed.
FootyQs is powered by Wikidata, a free, open knowledge base maintained by volunteers around the world. It stores structured facts about players, clubs and careers that we process into puzzles. We explain the full picture in our guide to how FootyQs works and where our data comes from. The upside is enormous breadth and openness. The trade-off is that coverage is uneven and depends on what volunteers have added so far.
When a player moves clubs, someone has to add that fact to the underlying data before our games can know about it. Very recent transfers can take a little while to appear, so the newest moves are the most likely to be temporarily absent. If a move happened only days ago, patience often solves the problem.
Well-known players in major leagues tend to be thoroughly documented, while those from lower divisions or smaller leagues sometimes have thinner records. A career that is fully captured for a Premier League regular might be only partly recorded for a player who spent most of their time in lower tiers.
The further back you go, the patchier records tend to be. Players from earlier decades may have incomplete career details simply because the source information is harder to find and verify. That can mean an old connection you remember well is not yet reflected in the data.
Brief stays, especially loan spells, are among the details most easily overlooked when records are compiled. A player might be correctly listed for their main clubs but missing a short loan that would have created the very connection you are looking for.
Many players are known by more than one name: a full name, a shortened version, a nickname, or a different transliteration from another alphabet. If your answer is not recognised, the player may well be in our data under a different spelling. Trying an alternative form of the name often does the trick.
It is a fair question. The strength of building on an open knowledge base is that it draws on the work of thousands of contributors and stays consistent and verifiable. If we started hand-editing facts in isolation, we would risk introducing errors and drifting away from a trusted, shared source. We would rather rely on the collective, checkable record and be transparent about its limits than quietly patch things behind the scenes.
Here is the encouraging part: because Wikidata is openly editable, gaps can genuinely be fixed, and anyone can help.
In other words, the football-loving community is quietly making our games richer all the time. A gap you notice today may well be filled by someone, perhaps even you, tomorrow.
No football database is ever perfectly complete, and we would rather be open about that than pretend otherwise. The occasional missing name is the price of drawing on a vast, free and constantly improving open resource — and that resource is exactly what lets us cover so many players and clubs in the first place. Keep playing Two Clubs, One Player, the grid and our other games, and if you ever want to understand more about the project, visit the about page.