Frequently asked questions
Accounts, streaks, rejected answers, replaying old boards, Teams mode and playing against friends.
Is FootyFacts Board free?
Yes, completely. There is no paid tier and nothing is locked. The site is funded by advertising, which is why you will see ad slots around the board.
Do I need an account?
No. The whole game is playable signed out, and your scores are kept in your browser. An account only adds one thing: a globally unique username, so your stats and streak follow you to another device.
Does everyone get the same puzzle?
Yes. The daily board is generated from the date itself, so every player anywhere gets the identical nine cells on a given day. No server decides it — the same date always produces the same grid, which is also why the archive can rebuild any past board exactly.
Why was my answer rejected when the player did play there?
Almost always a gap in the underlying data rather than a judgement call. A cell accepts any player whose record satisfies both categories, and those records come from Wikidata — short loan spells and lower-league moves are the ones most often missing. If you find a clear error, send it in and it gets fixed on the next data build.
Why do I get points instead of a percentage?
Earlier versions showed a "only 3% of players picked this" style figure. That number was modelled, not measured — the site does not have per-answer statistics from real players — so presenting it as though it were real data was misleading. It was replaced with a point value, which is honest about being a scoring rule rather than a survey.
Can I replay an old board?
Yes, from the Archive tab in the game or from any dated page in the puzzle archive. Replays count toward your practice stats, never toward the daily streak — otherwise a rainy afternoon could manufacture a year-long streak.
What is Teams mode?
The same engine run over clubs instead of players: the nine cells ask you to name a club that satisfies both categories. It has its own category set and its own dataset.
How do I play against friends?
The Competition tab creates a shared board behind one link. Everyone who opens it plays the identical grid against a countdown, and the leaderboard reveals when the last player finishes.
Which browsers are supported?
Any current version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge, on desktop or mobile. The game needs JavaScript; the written pages on this site do not.
Why are there ads, and why not on every screen?
Advertising is the only thing funding the site, so there are ad slots around the board and on the written pages. There are deliberately none on screens that are pure interface — the loading state, error screens, competition lobbies and the not-found page carry no ads at all, because a screen whose content is the interface itself is not a screen anyone should be advertising against.
How often does the player data change?
Only when the dataset is deliberately rebuilt, which is a manual step rather than a nightly job. The data ships with the site as a fixed file, so every visitor is playing against an identical copy and a past board rebuilds exactly as it was. The trade-off is that a correction reported today appears with the next build, not immediately.
Can I use the data for something else?
The football facts come from Wikidata and are public domain under CC0, so yes — but take them from Wikidata rather than from here. You will get a fuller, better-maintained copy, and this site’s file is filtered and reshaped for the puzzle rather than for general use.
Something else?
Send it over — especially data corrections.