Teams mode: the same grid, played with clubs

The second game on this site runs the same engine over 5,081 clubs instead of players — different categories, a different kind of knowledge, and a board that is harder than it looks.

What changes

The board is identical in shape — nine cells, six categories, one answer each — but the thing you are naming is a club rather than a footballer. "German club" crossed with "Won the European Cup", or "Play in yellow" crossed with "Founded before 1900". Switch between the two games with the Players / Teams toggle at the top left of the board.

Everything downstream of the dataset is shared: the same scoring model, the same one-appearance-per-answer rule, the same solvability proof, the same four modes. Only the records and the category set differ, which is why a club board feels familiar and plays completely differently.

Why it is harder than it sounds

Players are individuals with long, varied careers, so a player cell usually has many routes into it. A club is a single fixed record: one country, one continent, one league, one founding year, one set of colours. Nothing about a club accumulates the way a career does.

That makes club cells narrower, and it makes the categories interact more sharply. "Spanish club" crossed with "European club" would be no constraint at all, so pairings like that are blocked outright. "English club" crossed with "Plays in La Liga" is not blocked — it simply produces an empty cell that the solvability check throws away before the board is served.

The upshot is that colours and founding dates carry far more weight here than they would in the players game. They are the categories that cut across country and league instead of agreeing with them, and they are where most club boards are actually decided.

Where the clubs come from

The oldest club in the set was founded in 1845, and the median founding year is 1963. 22 clubs have won the European Cup or Champions League. Geographically the set is broad but uneven — European football is documented far more thoroughly than anywhere else, and the counts show it plainly:

Best-represented countries

Named leagues

As in the players game, only competitions the source data identifies confidently are named. Every other club is still in the set and still a valid answer — it simply has no league label, so it can never appear in a league cell.

Every teams category

Grouped by family, with the real number of qualifying clubs. The same reading applies as on the players categories page: two thin categories crossed is where a board gets decided.

Country

Continent

League

Honours

Founding era

Colours

City

Scoring, briefly

Identical to the players game. Each valid club is scored against the other valid clubs for that cell, obvious answers pay little and obscure ones pay a lot, and a club can be used only once per board. The full derivation applies unchanged.