Guess the club

How to play guess the club

1. Each round has five clubs. The first clue is the year the club was founded and its country.
2. Pick one of the four answers (multiple choice) or switch to Type the name for a harder game with type-ahead suggestions.
3. A wrong answer opens the next clue and, in multiple choice, greys out the button you pressed. You can also press Next clue at any time.
4. Clues come in this order: founding year and country, colours, a famous former player, nickname, then the ground and city.
5. At the end, copy your result as a line of ticks and crosses to share without spoiling the answers.

Scoring

A club is worth 5 points on the first clue, then 4, 3, 2 and 1. The best possible daily score is 25. For well-known clubs the colours or the famous player are often enough, and the nickname clue (“The Toffees”, “Los Colchoneros”) is close to a giveaway.

Example: the first clue reads Founded 1867 · England. That is older than almost every league club, so serious fans think of Nottingham Forest (1865) or Sheffield Wednesday (1867). The next clue, Blue and white stripes, settles it: Sheffield Wednesday, 4 points.

Tips

• Learn a few founding years. Many clubs were formed in a short burst between 1874 and 1905. A year in the 1860s points to a handful of the oldest English clubs; 1970 can only be Paris Saint-Germain in this list.
• Use the country. In multiple-choice mode the wrong options usually come from the same country, so the country alone will not decide it, but it rules out half your ideas in typing mode.
• Colours repeat. Claret and blue is Aston Villa, West Ham and Burnley; red and white stripes are worn by Sunderland, Southampton, Athletic Bilbao and Atlético Madrid. Wait for the next clue if you see a common kit.
• The famous player is a strong clue but players move. We picked a player linked with that club above all others, such as Matt Le Tissier at Southampton or Eusébio at Benfica.

Ideas for clubs, classes and quiz nights

Daily challenge in a group chat. Everyone plays the same five, then pastes the copied result line. It works well for five-a-side teams and supporters' WhatsApp groups.

Pub quiz picture-free round. Read out the clues for a club, one at a time. Teams can buzz in after any clue; give 5 points for an answer after clue one down to 1 after clue five.

Classroom geography. Ask pupils to find each city on a map after they guess the club. Founding years make a simple timeline exercise: put the five clubs in order of age.

About the clues

Only text clues are used, never club badges or crests. Founding years are the year each club gives as its own start, even if it began under a different name, which is why Sunderland is 1879 and Manchester City 1880. For grounds that have changed, the clue names the current one and the famous old one, for example Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (White Hart Lane until 2017) or Everton's move from Goodison Park to Bramley-Moore Dock in 2025. Famous former players are all retired, so the clue will not go out of date.

How we tested it

We checked the founding year, nickname and ground of 14 of the 48 clubs against their Wikipedia pages in October 2026: Sevilla, Valencia, Feyenoord, PSV, Porto, Hamburger SV, Sporting CP, Lyon, Sheffield Wednesday, Burnley, Wolves, Sunderland, Fulham and Ipswich Town. That check changed two clues: Hamburg's nickname is now given as “Die Rothosen” (the red shorts), and the Juventus and Lyon ground notes were corrected. The rest are well-known facts about the biggest clubs that we were sure of.

Automated Node tests check that all 48 clubs have every clue field and a founding year between 1850 and 2000, that no two clubs share an accepted answer, that the first three clues never contain the club's name, that 50 different daily rounds each have five different clubs and come out the same when generated again, that every multiple-choice set has four different options including the right answer, and that “atletico madrid” without the accent is accepted. All tests pass.