Football connections

How to play football connections

1. Look at the 16 tiles. Each one is a club, a player, a ground, a country or a football word.
2. Tap four tiles you think share something, then press Submit.
3. If you are right, the group locks in at the top in its colour with the link written above it. If not, you lose one of your four mistakes.
4. “One away” means three of your four are right. Change one tile.
5. Find all four groups before your mistakes run out. Shuffle moves the tiles around, which often helps you see new links.

The kinds of links you will meet

Groups are coloured from yellow (most direct) to purple (sneakiest). Typical links include:

• Nicknames: clubs named after birds (Norwich, Brighton, Newcastle, Swansea), nicknames from local trades (Hatters, Cobblers, Potters, Saddlers), or mammals (Foxes, Wolves, Tigers, Rams).
• History: Ballon d'Or winners, the 1966 England team, Arsenal's 2003–04 Invincibles, scorers in the 2005 Champions League final, the six goalkeepers who have scored in the Premier League.
• Places: famous stands like the Holte End, grounds that clubs have left such as Highbury and Maine Road, and stadiums named after people.
• Wordplay: words that follow “Golden” (Boot, Glove, Goal, Boy) or “Real” in a Spanish club name, and place names that become league clubs when you add “United”, “City”, “Town” or “Rovers”.

Tips for solving

• Look for the red herring first. Most puzzles have a tile that seems to fit two groups. “Ball” could be a word after “Golden” or Alan Ball from 1966; “Charlton” could be a London club or a 1966 player. The puzzle is built so only one reading works, so find the group where the tile is essential.
• Solve the purple group last unless you spot it at once. Clearing the easier groups leaves fewer tiles, and the wordplay link becomes obvious.
• Read the exact group name after you solve it. Wording such as “league club” or “managing an English club” matters, and it will help you in later puzzles that reuse a theme with different tiles.
• Do not spend mistakes guessing. With four lives you can afford one exploratory guess, not three.

Using it in a pub quiz or classroom

Put a puzzle on a TV or projector and give teams two minutes per group. Score 1 point per correct group and a bonus for naming the link exactly. In class it is a good discussion exercise: ask pupils to explain why a tile does not belong to a group, which practises reasoning as much as football knowledge. Puzzles 10 and 11, built around club-name endings like “Athletic”, “County” and “Wanderers”, work well for younger fans because they need no history at all.

How the puzzles are made

Each group comes from a category with a full member list behind it, not just the four tiles you see. The list for “Goalkeepers who scored in the Premier League”, for example, holds all six: Schmeichel, Friedel, Robinson, Howard, Begović and Alisson. When we build a puzzle, a test checks every tile against every other group's full list, so “Maldini” can sit in a one-club-men group only in puzzles that do not also contain the 2005 Champions League final scorers. Facts are historical and fixed: past winners, former grounds, finished careers.

How we tested it

Automated Node tests run over all 22 puzzles. They check that each puzzle has 16 different tiles in four groups of four from four different categories, that every tile is in its own category's member list, and that no tile appears in the member list of any other group in the same puzzle. The ambiguity check matters: while writing the puzzles we found that England (“Three Lions”) could not sit beside an animal-nickname group, and that Brad Friedel had to be added to the goalkeeper list after we checked it against Wikipedia's list of goalkeepers who have scored in the Premier League. The tests also confirm the game logic: a correct four is accepted, three-plus-one gives “one away”, and two-plus-two does not. All tests pass. We also checked that Spain won the 2026 World Cup, so the list of World Cup winners is unchanged.