Futbolle: Eighteen Daily Football Puzzles

Every few months someone writes to us about a daily puzzle they've built. Most of them are a single game. This one is eighteen.

Futbolle is the work of one developer in Turkey, and as of this week it is forty-three days old. Fifteen single-player puzzles and three live multiplayer rooms, all football, all resetting once a day. There is no studio behind it, no funding, and — the developer is unusually direct about this — no revenue. We'll get to that. First, the games, because the design decisions are the interesting part.

The gap they noticed

The daily-puzzle format has quietly colonised almost every category of trivia. Words have Wordle and its hundred descendants. Geography has Worldle and Globle. Music has Heardle, film has Framed, maths has Nerdle. You solve one, you share your grid, you come back tomorrow.

Football — the most watched sport on earth — had a handful of scattered one-offs and nothing that gathered them together. That was the observation Futbolle was built on: not that a football Wordle didn't exist, but that a football daily didn't exist as a place. Eighteen puzzles under one roof is the answer to that.

Football Wordle, and the rule that makes it work

Start with the one your eye will recognise instantly. Six rows, one hidden name, green and yellow tiles. Standard Wordle grammar.

What changes is what counts as a word. The answer is a footballer's known name — usually a first name, but for the players who go by one word, Gavi or Pedri, it's the nickname. The length changes every day, and the board tells you the length before you start (today's is seven letters).

The rule that matters is the one governing guesses. You can only submit names that real players in six leagues actually go by: the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and the Turkish Süper Lig. That's it. You cannot brute-force the puzzle out of an English dictionary, because the dictionary is a squad list. Accents are simplified so nobody is punished for a keyboard — Barış Alper Yılmaz is playable as BARIS.

That one restriction is the whole design. If you've played Wordle a lot, you know the skill it rewards is a feel for the language — which letters are common, which openers eliminate the most. Football Wordle rewards a different skill entirely. You're not searching a language; you're searching your own football memory. Someone who has never read a novel but has watched every Saturday of Serie A for a decade will beat a crossword champion at it, and that's the point.

Missing 11

This is the one people send to their friends.

Futbolle puts a real starting eleven in front of you — an actual line-up from an actual match, arranged in the formation the manager actually used — and hides three of the names behind their shirt numbers. You get six guesses for three shirts.

Today's is Bayern Munich from the 2012 Champions League final, the one they lost at home in Munich on penalties, and the three blanks are number 33, number 7 and number 39. If you were watching that night, at least two of those come back to you in a second and the third makes you stare at the ceiling.

There are 256 squads in the pool, drawn from the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, Euro 2020 and Euro 2024, and AFCON 2023. A quiet piece of engineering worth noting: two line-ups that overlap by more than eighty per cent are never both scheduled, so the same tournament doesn't show up twice in one week wearing a different date.

Football Grid

Nine cells. Six clubs — three across the top, three down the side. The same question in every square: which footballer has turned out for both of these teams?

It takes about thirty seconds to understand and considerably longer to get good at. What makes it sharp is that the grid never asks what you know about a club. It asks what you know about the space between two of them — the journeymen, the loan spells, the one season somebody spent at Sevilla before the big move. It's the kind of puzzle that turns a group chat into an argument.

The other fifteen

The rest of the roster, briefly:

• Career Path walks you through a player's clubs in order until you name him.
• Transfer Fee is higher-or-lower, played with real transfer records.
• Top 10 asks you to reconstruct a list from memory — most appearances for a club, most goals in a season.
• Football Connections hands you sixteen players and four hidden groups, in the shape the New York Times made famous, except every category is a football one.
• Who's That? unblurs a photograph one step at a time.
• A Logo Quiz, a Bingo card, and a Champions League Grid that runs while the competition does.
• Three live rooms, where you play other people in real time instead of the clock.

If you've spent time with our own Pairdle, you'll recognise the philosophy: one format, one twist, one a day. Futbolle just does it eighteen times over.

The midnight decision

One choice deserves its own section, because it's the kind of thing most players never notice and most developers get wrong.

Every Futbolle puzzle resets at the player's own local midnight, not at a fixed hour on a server somewhere. Everyone in the world still gets the same puzzle number and the same answer on the same calendar day, so shared results stay comparable — but a player in Istanbul or Bogotá doesn't have to wait until the middle of their afternoon for a new day to begin.

The developer says this made the engineering harder and that they'd do it again. Anyone who has built a daily game (we have — several times) will nod at that. Puzzle numbering, streak logic and share text all get more complicated the moment "today" means something different in every timezone. It's the correct call, and it's rarer than it should be.

Where the data comes from

Squads are synced from open sources — 3,083 players across the six leagues at the last full sync on 10 August — and the next sync runs after the transfer window shuts on 1 September, which is when the guess list will catch up with the summer's moves. Historic line-ups for Missing 11 come from public match records.

How it makes money

It doesn't, and the developer wanted that stated plainly rather than left for readers to guess at.

Futbolle earns nothing today. No subscription, no paywall, no registration wall, no data sold to anyone. There are no ad units on the site. The developer applied to Google AdSense twice and was rejected twice, both times for "low-value content" — which, in their own words, was a fair verdict on a site that was three weeks old at the time. They haven't reapplied and say they won't until the traffic justifies it.

We'll add our own note here, because we've been through that exact door: an AdSense rejection on a three-week-old games site is not a judgement on the games. It's a judgement on how much crawlable text exists around them, and the fix is patience and writing, not a redesign.

The plan, in the order the developer expects it to happen: if the audience grows, display advertising is the likely first revenue. Separately, they are in conversation with football publishers about licensing the games as a white-label daily section — which they'd prefer, because it leaves the site itself clean. They've committed to saying so publicly if either of those changes, and to emailing us so this piece can be corrected rather than quietly becoming untrue. We'll hold them to that, and we'll update this post if we hear.

The practical details

• Free, no sign-up required.
• Works on a phone.
• Available in English, Spanish and Turkish.
• Six leagues: Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Süper Lig.
• A new set of eighteen puzzles every day at your local midnight.

You can play at futbolle.com.

Why we're writing about it

We don't run a football site, and Futbolle isn't ours. But we care a great deal about the daily-puzzle format — it's what Pairdle is built on, and we've written before about why the five-letter, one-a-day shape works so well. Futbolle is a good illustration of the format's real strength: the mechanics are cheap to learn and the dictionary is where the character lives. Swap a word list for a squad list and you've built a completely different game out of the same six rows.

Forty-three days is nothing. Whether it lasts depends on the things every solo daily-game depends on — showing up every day, keeping the data fresh, and finding the audience before the developer runs out of road. But eighteen games in, with the squad sync scheduled and the timezone logic done properly, it looks like someone who intends to keep showing up.

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Editor's note: This piece went into Daily Word Games because Football Wordle is the front door, but it doesn't sit comfortably there — nor in Trivia & Quiz. Futbolle is part of something we're seeing more of: daily puzzles built on a sport rather than a subject, where the "dictionary" is a squad list, a fixture history, a transfer ledger. Perhaps sports games deserve their own category on this blog. If you'd read it — or if you're building one — let us know what you think at tim@logicloftgames.com.

By Jenna Nye, Logic Loft Games