Champions Grid#23

How the pool is decided

The club list is not hand-written: each season it is pulled from UEFA's confirmed league-phase line-up. Whoever is in the Champions League this year is on the board, and a club that was there last year but not this one drops out. Teams still in qualifying are deliberately excluded — calling them "in the Champions League" before they have qualified would simply be wrong. Once the play-off round finishes in late August, the pool fills out to all 36.

Playing a round, step by step

• Read the club to the left of a row and the club above a column. Their meeting point is that pair's cell.
• Type a player's name into the search box. Suggestions start after two letters.
• Pick the player — if they fit a square, they drop into it automatically.
• If nothing on the board fits, you are told so, but the guess is still spent.
• Keep going until the grid is full or your nine guesses are gone.

How the narrow pool changes your thinking

• Don't get stuck on this season's squads. The question is not who plays there now — anyone who ever wore both shirts counts.
• Think in European transfer corridors. Porto → England, Ajax and PSV → Spain, Dortmund → Bayern: these routes have carried dozens of names.
• Don't skip Galatasaray. Plenty of well-known European players passed through the Süper Lig, and that is usually the most productive square on the board.
• Don't underrate the smaller clubs. Club Brugge, Slavia Prague and Shakhtar are in the pool too, and the road from those clubs to the big leagues is well travelled.
• Save the journeymen. If a name fits two cells, spend him on the one where you cannot think of an alternative.

What counts

Every club in a footballer's senior career counts, loan spells included. Youth football does not. One detail matters: the crossover is measured by career, not by European football — the player does not need to have played a Champions League match for that club, only to have played for the club, in any season. And each footballer can be used only once per board.

Where the data comes from

The participant list comes from Wikipedia's current-season page, club histories from Wikipedia career tables, and photographs from TheSportsDB. Validation happens on the server and the accepting pool is deliberately generous: if a player genuinely turned out for both clubs, the grid takes them. If you are certain and the game disagrees, the feedback button at the bottom of the page reaches us directly.

Scoring, sharing and the daily reset

Your score is the number of cells you filled. When the round ends, every empty square reveals one faded possible answer. A new board arrives at midnight in your own time zone, and everyone gets the same six clubs that day.