Glossary

The vocabulary this site uses — cells, families, bands, deep cuts, fame, caps and the rest — defined precisely, including the ones that mean something specific here.

Some of these are ordinary football terms, some are specific to this game, and a few are words that mean something narrower here than they do in general use. The narrow ones are where confusion usually starts.

The board

Board: One three-by-three grid: three categories down the side, three across the top, nine cells. Boards are generated from a seed rather than stored, which is why any past date can be rebuilt exactly.
Cell: One of the nine intersections. A cell is defined by its row category and its column category together, and it accepts any player who satisfies both.
Category: A single condition on a player's record — "Played for Ajax", "Brazilian", "Goalkeeper". Every category on this site is a plain predicate over the dataset, and all of them are listed with their sizes.
Family: A group of related categories — clubs, leagues, nationality, honours, position, career shape, club geography, era. Families exist to keep boards varied and to block nonsense pairings: no cell asks for a player who is both Brazilian and Argentine.
Valid answer / candidate: A player in the dataset who satisfies both of a cell's categories. Cells routinely have dozens; the generator will not publish one with fewer than 3 or more than 400.
Perfect matching: The proof that a board is solvable. Because a player can be used only once, nine cells each having valid answers is not enough — they could all be the same few players. A matching algorithm confirms nine distinct answers can exist at the same time before a board is ever served.

Scoring

Points: What an answer is worth, between 5 and 200. Points belong to the pairing of player and cell, not to the player: the same footballer scores differently in different cells.
Band: A named range of point values — Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary, Mythical — which drives a filled cell's colour and the emoji in a shared result. A band describes what an answer was worth, and nothing else.
Deep cut: Informal, but it has a precise meaning here: a valid answer that almost nobody would produce, and therefore one worth a lot of points. The object of the game.
Fame: A 1–100 figure carried by every player, derived at build time from the substance of their public record. It is the only input to scoring, it is never displayed, and it is used only to rank candidates against each other within one cell.
Pick share: The modelled likelihood that a given candidate is the answer somebody reaches for. It is a simulation, not measured data, and the game deliberately never shows it — the reasoning is on the scoring page.
Hint: A description of the best-known remaining answer's career, with the player's name and anything the cell already implies filtered out. Costs 25 points.

Modes

Daily: The one board a day everybody plays, generated from the date. The only mode that extends a streak.
Practice: Unlimited generated boards, kept in a separate set of statistics.
Archive: A past daily, rebuilt exactly and replayable. Records as practice, never as a daily.
Competition: A shared board behind one link, played against a countdown, with a leaderboard at the end. Never touches lifetime stats.
Impossible mode: A toggle that rejects any answer worth less than 45 points, removing the obvious pick from every cell.
Streak: Consecutive days on which you finished that day's daily board. Computed in UTC, recomputed against today every time it is shown, and impossible to backfill from the archive.

Football terms, as this site uses them

Nationality: The national team a player represents — not citizenship and not place of birth. The three differ often enough to matter, and this distinction is the single most common reason a nationality cell surprises people.
Cap: One senior international appearance. Caps are recorded too patchily in the source data to drive a category here, which is why you will not find a "100+ caps" cell on a board.
Club country: The country a club is based in. Recorded for nearly every club and effectively permanent, which makes it the most dependable field in the dataset and the basis of the geography categories.
League: A named competition a club played in. Less reliable than club country, because clubs move between divisions, so only the competitions the data identifies confidently are used.
Top-five leagues: The Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 — the scope the player dataset was built around.
Spell: One period at one club. Club categories count any spell at all, so a half-season loan qualifies exactly as much as a decade at the same club.

Where a term describes something about how the data was built rather than how the game is played, the methodology page has the longer version.