Futbolle Career Path

How a round works

A legendary footballer is chosen for the day and his club career is laid out as a table — years, club, appearances, goals. At the start only the first club is visible. Type a name into the search box; if you are wrong, the next club appears and the table grows. The number of guesses you get is not fixed: it equals the number of clubs the player had. A one-club man gives you almost nothing to work with; a career journeyman gives you eight or nine chances but a much wider field of candidates. Everyone playing on the same date gets the same career.

Reading the table

• The years matter as much as the club names. A spell that starts in 1998 immediately rules out anyone who debuted after that.
• Appearances tell you what kind of player he was. Two hundred games at one club is a mainstay; eleven games is a spell that went wrong.
• Goals separate the positions. A forward's line looks nothing like a full-back's, and that alone halves the field.
• The first club is usually a youth academy. Ajax, La Masia, Clairefontaine — the starting point often reveals the nationality before the player does.

Strategy

The instinct is to guess as soon as a club feels familiar, and that instinct is expensive. The second club is far more informative than the first, because it shows the direction the career took — upward to a giant, sideways for minutes, or abroad. If you are stuck between two names with similar careers, look at the appearance counts: careers diverge in the details even when the club lists look alike. And remember that a wrong guess is not purely a loss — it buys you the next row, which is sometimes the row that gives the whole thing away.

What counts as a club

The table is built from senior career only. Loan spells appear because they are genuinely part of the career, and they are often the giveaway — a surprising loan to a small club is more memorable than a decade at a big one. Youth teams are not listed as career stops. Retirement clubs in leagues outside Europe are included, which is why some paths end in an unexpected country.

Where the data comes from

Career tables are taken from Wikipedia, the same source the site uses for every other game, and player photographs come from TheSportsDB. Because the source is a public career table, the numbers you see are the numbers the record shows. If a season looks wrong to you, the feedback button at the bottom of the page reaches us directly — several real corrections have come in that way.

Scoring, sharing and the daily reset

Your result is how many clubs had to be revealed before you got it. Fewer is better, and the shareable result is spoiler-free so you can post it without ruining anyone's round. A new career appears at midnight in your own time zone; statistics live on your device and nothing needs installing.