Who am I? Football quiz

How to play the who am I football quiz

1. A round has 10 players picked at random from the 48 in the game. The first clue is the player's position.
2. Start typing a name in the answer box. Matching players appear underneath; tap one, or press Enter to send what you typed.
3. Stuck? Press Next clue. The clues come in this order: position, nationality, honours, clubs with years, and a fun fact.
4. A wrong guess also opens the next clue, so wild guessing is not free.
5. After the tenth player you see your total out of 50 and your best score on this device.

How the scoring works

Each player is worth 5 points if you name them from the position alone, 4 after the nationality, 3 after the honours, 2 after the club list and 1 after the fun fact. Giving up scores 0. A perfect round is 50 points, which means naming every player from one line of text. That is very hard: “Striker” fits about a dozen of the players, so in practice the second and third clues are where most points are won.

A quick worked example: the first clue says Goalkeeper, the second Denmark. Most fans will now say Peter Schmeichel and score 4 points. If you wait for the honours (Euro 1992, Champions League 1999), you are surer but only score 3.

Tips for a higher score

• Use the nationality and position together. There are only a handful of Welsh forwards or Danish goalkeepers in the list. Think of who is famous enough to be in a quiz like this.
• Read the honours carefully. Ballon d'Or years, World Cup wins and the Treble are strong hints. Three Ballons d'Or narrows it down to a very short list.
• The club clue is a giveaway for most fans, but it is still worth 2 points. Look at the first club: careers that started at Cannes, Den Bosch or Cobh Ramblers are memorable.
• Do not guess blindly. A wrong answer costs a clue, exactly like asking for one, so only guess when you have a real candidate.

Ideas for pubs, classrooms and parties

Pub quiz round. Press Show all answers (quiz host) and print the list. Read the clues one at a time. Teams write a name on their sheet whenever they feel sure, and the quizmaster notes after which clue each team answered. Scoring 5 to 1 rewards bold teams without punishing careful ones.

Classroom starter. Put the game on the board and let the class vote after each clue. It works well for a five-minute warm-up and it practises reading, geography (nationalities) and timelines (club years). Ask pupils to write their own “who am I” for a player they know, using the same five clue types.

Family or car game. One person reads clues from a phone, everyone else guesses. Younger players can be given the club clue first to keep it fair.

Why the players are all retired

Every player has finished their playing career, so their clubs, years and honours will not change. Most are household names from the Premier League era or earlier (Thierry Henry, Alan Shearer, Paolo Maldini, Ian Rush), with greats from abroad such as Johan Cruyff, Diego Maradona and Pelé. We left out a player when we found a fact we could not pin down: for example, Ronaldinho was removed because his record now shows a new club in 2026, so his career is not fixed.

How we tested it

We checked the club spells and years of 36 of the 48 players against the career table on each player's Wikipedia page in October 2026, and corrected two entries along the way (Fernando Torres's Milan years and the wording of Wayne Rooney's England record). The other 12 have short careers we were confident of, mostly at one or two clubs, such as Maldini at AC Milan or Totti at Roma. Goal totals in the clues (Lineker's 48 for England, Dalglish's 102 caps and 30 goals) were checked against the national-team records pages.

The game logic has automated Node tests. They check that all 48 players have every clue field, that no two players share an accepted answer, that no fun fact or honours line contains the player's surname, that “pele” is accepted for Pelé and “Lothar Matthaus” for Matthäus, that a first name alone (“Thierry”) is not accepted, that typing “zid” suggests Zinedine Zidane first, and that points run from 5 down to 1. All of these tests pass.