Football trivia is at its best when it goes deeper than "who scored the goal?" The interesting questions are the ones that make you think — where did that player come from, when exactly did that happen, what connects these four seemingly random footballers?
That's what Football IQ is built around. Five different puzzle types, each testing a different corner of your football knowledge, with fresh content every single day. Here's how each one works.
Career Path: Test Your Transfer History Knowledge
What it tests: How well you know where players have been.
A footballer's career is laid out on screen — every club, the years they were there, sometimes the number of appearances. The player's name is hidden. Your job is to figure out who it is.
You can guess at any point. Get it wrong and the next career step is revealed as a hint. The scoring rewards confidence: guess correctly after just one or two clues and you'll score far higher than someone who needed the full history.
What makes it hard: The difficulty varies wildly. One day might feature a world-famous striker whose career you know by heart. The next might be a winger who had seven clubs across five countries — and unless you know that specific loan spell at Sassuolo, you're stuck.
Strategy tip: Look at the timeline. If a player spent their youth years at a club in the late 1990s and moved to a major league in the mid-2000s, you can narrow the era immediately. Academy spells are often the biggest giveaway.
Transfer Guess: One Deal, One Player
What it tests: Your knowledge of specific transfers.
You're shown a single transfer: the selling club, the buying club, and the fee. That's it. Three optional hints are available — the year of the transfer, the player's position, and their nationality.
What makes it hard: Transfer fees can be deceptively generic. A £25m move from a La Liga club to an English club could describe dozens of players. The skill is in triangulating: "Which left-back moved from Atletico Madrid to Chelsea for around £60m?" narrows things down fast if you know your market.
Strategy tip: The fee and the clubs together usually narrow it to 3-4 candidates. Use the year hint first — it's the most efficient tiebreaker.
Connections: Find the Hidden Links
What it tests: Lateral thinking and pattern recognition.
Sixteen footballer names are presented in a 4x4 grid. Behind the chaos, they belong to four groups of four, connected by a shared theme. Your job is to identify all four groups.
Themes range from the obvious (players who've won the World Cup) to the fiendish (players whose surnames are types of weather). You get four lives — each incorrect grouping costs one. The four categories are colour-coded by difficulty: yellow is the easiest, purple is the hardest.
What makes it hard: Red herrings. The categories are deliberately designed so that players could plausibly belong to multiple groups. A player who's played for both AC Milan and Chelsea could be in a "Serie A legends" group or a "Blues players" group — figuring out which connection the puzzle actually wants is the challenge.
Strategy tip: Start by looking for the most specific connection. If you can spot four players who share something very precise (all born in the same city, all scored in the same World Cup final), lock that group in first. The broader categories are easier to get wrong.
Timeline: When Did It Happen?
What it tests: Your chronological knowledge of football history.
Six football events are presented out of order. Drag them into the correct sequence, from earliest to most recent.
What makes it hard: Memory plays tricks. You might remember both Beckham's free kick against Greece and Henry's volley against Manchester United, but which came first? Events that feel like they happened in the same era are often years apart — and events that feel decades apart sometimes happened in the same season.
Strategy tip: Anchor the sequence with the events you're most certain about. If you absolutely know that one event happened in 2001, place it and build outward. Don't try to sort all six at once.
Topical Quiz: This Week's Headlines
What it tests: Whether you've been paying attention.
Five multiple-choice questions based on the week's biggest football stories. Exact scorelines, goalscorers, managerial changes, transfer announcements — anything that made the news in the last seven days is fair game.
What makes it hard: It rewards detail. Knowing that Arsenal won at the weekend isn't enough — you need to know the score, who scored, and possibly in which minute. The questions are designed to separate fans who read the headlines from fans who watch the matches.
Strategy tip: There's no trick here. Watch the games, follow the news, and you'll do well. This is the one mode where being a current-season obsessive pays off directly.
How to Get the Best Scores
Every puzzle rewards knowledge over guessing, but the specifics vary:
- Career Path: Guess early. Each additional clue you need reduces your score.
- Transfer Guess: Use fewer hints. Solving without tapping any of the three hints gives a perfect score.
- Connections: Don't lose lives. Each wrong grouping attempt costs you, and running out of lives ends the puzzle.
- Timeline: Get the order right. Partial credit is given for events in roughly the right position, but perfection scores highest.
- Topical Quiz: Get the questions right. Speed matters less than accuracy here.
Share Your Results
Every puzzle generates a spoiler-free shareable result — a visual grid or score summary that shows how you did without revealing any answers. Share it to your group chat, your Twitter, or your Instagram story to see how you compare with friends.
The share format is deliberately designed to start conversations. When your mate sees you scored 5/5 on the Topical Quiz and they only managed 3, they're going to want to talk about the two they got wrong.
11 Game Modes on the App
The five web puzzles are the daily free selection. The full Football IQ app has 11 game modes in total, including:
- The Grid — Fill a 3x3 grid where each cell must match two criteria
- Starting XI — Name the missing players from iconic lineups
- Who Am I? — Guess the footballer from 5 progressive clues
- Goalscorer Recall — Name every scorer from a classic match
- The Chain — Link players through shared clubs
- Top Tens — Guess the top 10 in each category
- Higher or Lower — Compare real player stats in a streak game
- Threads — Identify the club from their kit history
Plus a full puzzle archive, streaks, achievements, and the ability to compete with friends.
Download Football IQ on the App Store →
New puzzles go live every day. Bookmark football-iq.app and make it part of your daily routine.