About FootyFacts Board
What this site is, who runs it, why it exists, and the editorial standard the data is held to.
What this is
FootyFacts Board is a free daily soccer puzzle. Nine cells, six categories, one board a day, shared by everyone. It is built around a single idea that most football quizzes miss: being right is easy, and being interestingly right is the actual game. Naming Lionel Messi for "Argentine × Won the Ballon d'Or" is correct and worth almost nothing. The reward is for the name nobody else would find.
Why it exists
Grid puzzles caught on quickly, but most of them settle for a binary verdict — right or wrong — which means the person who knows one player per cell scores the same as the person who knows forty. That flattens exactly the knowledge the format should be rewarding. This site scores the depth of the answer instead of just its correctness, and it publishes how that score is calculated rather than treating it as a black box.
The standard the data is held to
The rule for this project is that a category ships only if the underlying fact can be sourced reliably. That has meant deleting work. Career caps and goal tallies, domestic league title counts, exact retirement years, "still playing", one-club status and a set of hand-curated traits were all built, and all removed, because the source data was not good enough to make them true often enough.
A puzzle that rejects a correct answer is worse than a puzzle with fewer categories. The methodology page covers what survived that cut and why.
What is actually on this site
Two games and a set of pages explaining them. The players game is the original — nine cells, name a footballer for each — and Teams mode runs the identical engine over clubs instead. Around them sit the things a puzzle this opinionated needs to publish if the scoring is going to be taken seriously: how a score is derived, every category and how many players qualify for it, every national team the data recognises, and where all of it came from.
There is also a rolling archive of recent boards broken down cell by cell, a strategy guide for playing them better, a glossary for the vocabulary, and a page on playing against other people. None of it is filler: if a page here could be written without the dataset in front of you, it would not be worth publishing.
Who runs it
FootyFacts Board is an independent site, built and maintained by one person. It is not affiliated with FIFA, UEFA, any league, or any club. All club and competition names are the property of their respective owners and are used descriptively, to state facts about players' careers.
Being one person is why the site does some things and not others. There is no comment section, no user-submitted content and no forum, because moderating one properly is not something a side project can promise. There is no newsletter and no notification system. The game does not require an account, and playing signed out is a first-class path rather than a degraded one. Everything the site does have is something that keeps working without supervision.
How it is funded
Advertising, and nothing else. There is no paid tier, no data is sold, and the game is not gated. Ads are deliberately kept off screens that are pure interface — loading states, error screens, the not-found page and competition lobbies carry none, because a screen whose content is the interface itself is not somewhere anybody should be advertising against. See privacy and cookies for exactly what the ads do and what choices you have about them, and the terms of use for the rest.
Get in touch
Corrections are genuinely welcome — a wrongly rejected answer is a bug, and reports are the fastest way they get found. Contact details are here.