Board #966 — 23 August 2026

The daily soccer grid for 23 August 2026: its six categories, 1,123 valid answers across nine cells, and where the difficulty sat.

This was the daily board on 23 August 2026 — the 966th since the game began. Boards are generated from their date rather than stored, so this one can be rebuilt exactly, and you can still play it from the Archive tab in the game.

The six categories

How the nine cells broke down

"Valid answers" is how many players in the dataset satisfied both categories. "Most obvious" is the best-known of them — the name most people reach for, and correspondingly the cheapest. "Best available" is the highest score anybody could have taken from that cell.

Where this board was won

The tightest cell was Won the World Cup × Played for a South American club, with just 17 valid answers in the entire dataset. The roomiest was Played in the Eredivisie × Played in 2+ of the top 5 leagues at 316, a spread of 299.

That gap is the whole game. The roomy cells are where a careless player burns their obvious names for a handful of points each; the tight ones are where the board is actually decided. Anyone who spent Lionel Messi early would have found the last cell considerably harder — a player can only be used once per board.

Who actually qualified

A sample of up to 6 valid answers per cell, spread across the full range rather than taken from the top of it, so each list runs from the obvious pick down towards the deep cuts. The number beside a name is what that answer would have paid in that cell — the same player is worth a different amount in a different cell, which is most of the strategy.

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