Soccer quiz: US soccer trivia

How to play the soccer quiz

Press Play the quiz for ten random questions. Each one has four options in random order; pick one and you see right away whether it is correct, with a short note on the moment behind it. At the end you get your score and the questions you missed, and “Play again” deals ten you have not seen yet. Your best score stays on your device.

The topic menu lets you play only one group: World Cup 1994, the USWNT, the USMNT, MLS and US soccer, World Cup 2026, or Rules. Question list shows the whole soccer quiz with answers hidden until you tap “Show answer”.

How to run a soccer trivia night

Soccer games run 90 minutes without timeouts, so trivia works best before kickoff, at halftime or after the final whistle. A simple plan for a watch party or a youth-club fundraiser:

1. Two halves of ten questions. First half: Rules plus World Cup 2026, so newer fans can score. Second half: USWNT, USMNT and MLS.
2. Scoring: 1 point per correct answer in the first half, 2 points in the second.
3. Stoppage time: one bonus question per half for 1 extra point, read after the marking.
4. Penalty shoot-out tie-breaker: five numeric questions, one at a time, closest answer wins each “kick”. Good ones are Mia Hamm’s 158 goals, Tim Howard’s 16 saves against Belgium and the 104 matches at the 2026 World Cup.

Worked example: a full game

With 10 questions at 1 point and 10 at 2 points, plus two stoppage-time bonuses, the maximum is 10 + 20 + 2 = 32. A team that gets 8 right in the first half, 6 in the second and one bonus scores 8 + 12 + 1 = 21. If two teams finish on 21, go to the shoot-out. First kick: “How many saves did Tim Howard make against Belgium?” A team that writes 14 is two away from 16 and beats a team that writes 11.

How the questions were chosen

This is an American soccer quiz, so most questions are about soccer in the United States, which you will not find in the usual European-focused quizzes. We followed the same accuracy rules as on all our quizzes:

• Results that are final: the USWNT’s Women’s World Cup titles in 1991, 1999, 2015 and 2019, MLS Cups, USA ’94.
• Records with a date: Tim Howard’s 16 saves came in 2014, Landon Donovan finished with 57 goals.
• World Cup 2026 facts that do not depend on results: hosts, format, stadiums.
• Rules taken from the IFAB Laws of the Game, explained in plain American English (a clean sheet is a shutout, a draw is a tie).

Wrong options are real players, teams, years and venues, so you can’t rule them out just by how they look.

How we tested

The quiz runs on one small engine, and we wrote automated Node tests for it (tests/quiz.test.js) and ran them before publishing. They read the question list straight from this page's source and check that:

• all 50 questions have a unique id and no question appears twice;
• every question has exactly four different options, and the correct answer is one of them;
• a round always contains 10 different questions, and a second round avoids the questions from the first while enough are left;
• after the options are shuffled, the engine still knows which button is right: in 600 test rounds (6,000 shuffled questions) per quiz the correct answer landed in each of the four positions about a quarter of the time, and was always the one marked correct;
• the score counts only right answers (all right gives 10/10, all wrong gives 0/10, and answering the same question twice is ignored).

Facts were checked separately. Questions were written from well-documented soccer history, and we used web searches against news reports and Wikipedia to confirm the details we were less sure of: Mia Hamm’s 158 international goals, Landon Donovan’s 57, Tim Howard’s World Cup record 16 saves, the U.S. Open Cup’s first edition in 1914, the LA Galaxy’s sixth MLS Cup in 2024 and Christian Pulisic being the first American man to play in a Champions League final. A question on Kristine Lilly’s total of international appearances was dropped because sources disagreed (352 or 354).

Every question was then reviewed a second time in a separate fact-check pass, and the details we doubted were checked against Wikipedia and news reports. That pass put the World Cup 2026 questions into the past tense, now that the tournament has been played.

Those are the only tests we ran: we have not tried the quiz with groups of players or on a range of phones, so if something looks wrong, please tell us.