Futbolle Football Wordle

The rules, briefly

A mystery footballer is chosen each day and you have six guesses to type the name he is known by. After every guess the tiles change colour: green means the right letter in the right place, yellow means the letter is in the name but somewhere else, and grey means it is not in the name at all. The number of tiles on the board tells you how long today's answer is, and that number moves — a four-letter day and an eight-letter day play completely differently.

Which name the game is asking for

This is the part that trips up new players, so it is worth being precise. The answer is the name football uses for him, not the name on his passport and not automatically his surname. For most players that is the first name. For players known by a nickname it is the nickname — Gavi, not Pablo Martín Páez Gavira; nobody in the game calls him the latter. Accents are simplified, so Barış is typed BARIS. Only names belonging to players from the six top leagues — Süper Lig, Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1 — are accepted as guesses.

Opening moves that actually help

• Spend the first guess on vowels. Football names lean heavily on A, E, I and O; a first guess that covers three of them narrows the board fast.
• Remember the common endings. Names ending in -O and -A are everywhere in this pool; a yellow O near the front often belongs at the back.
• Do not waste a turn on a name you already know is impossible. Every guess must be a real footballer name, but not every real name is a useful probe.
• Use the hint button when the board stalls. It reveals one letter and, importantly, does not cost you a guess — there is no reason to be proud about it.

Mid-game thinking

The hardest position in this game is three greens and no idea. When that happens, stop trying to solve the name and start eliminating letters instead: play a word that tests four unused consonants even if you are certain it is wrong. You will spend a guess and learn more than a hopeful attempt would tell you. The other common trap is fixating on the letter count — a five-letter name is not necessarily a short first name, it may be a nickname you have simply not considered.

Where the names come from

The pool is built from squad lists sourced from Wikipedia across the six leagues and refreshed as transfers happen, with photographs from TheSportsDB. Once you guess correctly, every player known by that name is shown with their picture — which is how you discover that today's answer belonged to four different people at once. If you are convinced a valid name was rejected, the feedback button at the bottom of the page comes straight to us; a report exactly like that is why the game now says "known name" instead of "first name".

Scoring, sharing and the daily reset

Your score is how many of the six guesses you used. The share button copies a spoiler-free grid of coloured squares — the letters never appear, only the pattern, so posting it in a group chat spoils nothing. A new name arrives at midnight in your own time zone, and everyone on the same date solves the same one. Statistics and streak live on your device; there is no account and nothing to install.