Player of the Day

How a round works

Pick a league first: Süper Lig, Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga or Ligue 1. Each league has its own mystery player, so you can play all six in a day if you want. Type a footballer's name into the search box and choose from the list. The moment you guess, a row appears comparing your player to the hidden one across all five attributes — and the colours tell you how close you were.

What the colours mean

• Green — an exact match. This attribute is now settled.
• Yellow — close, but not exact. A nation turns yellow when it shares a continent, a position when it is a neighbouring role, and age or shirt number when the gap is small.
• Grey — wrong, and worth just as much: a grey cell removes a whole branch of candidates.
• The arrow on age and shirt number shows whether the mystery player's value is higher (↑) or lower (↓) than yours — this is the single most efficient clue on the board.

Playing the first three guesses well

Beginners try to win on guess one and then spend the next seven confused. The stronger habit is to treat the opening guesses as instruments rather than attempts. Start with a player whose attributes are spread out — a mid-twenties midfielder from a mid-table club tells you something whatever the answer is. A 19-year-old superstar striker tells you almost nothing except that you were wrong. Once you have a green nation or a yellow position, the field collapses quickly; the arrows on age then do most of the remaining work.

Reading the board like a solver

• Combine, do not read row by row. Two yellows across separate guesses often pin an attribute more tightly than a single green would.
• Trust the arrows over your instinct. If age says ↑ twice, stop guessing 24-year-olds however well they otherwise fit.
• Shirt numbers cluster by position. A low number with a ↑ arrow quietly rules out most defenders.
• Use a deliberate probe when stuck. A guess you know is wrong but which tests an untouched nation or position is often worth more than a hopeful one.

Where the data comes from

Squads, nationalities, positions, birth dates and shirt numbers come from Wikipedia and are refreshed as transfers happen; photographs come from TheSportsDB. Ages are calculated live rather than stored, so a puzzle never quietly goes out of date. If a player's details look wrong to you, the feedback button at the bottom of the page comes straight to us — several real data corrections have arrived exactly that way.

Scoring, sharing and the daily reset

Your score is how many of the eight guesses you needed. The share button copies a spoiler-free grid of coloured squares — the pattern travels, the names never do. A new mystery player is picked at midnight in your own time zone and everyone on the same date in the same league hunts the same footballer. Your streak and statistics stay on your device; there is no account and nothing to install.