The New York Times’ Connections puzzle has become one of the great daily rituals for people who like to start their morning with a bit of lateral thinking, taking its place alongside Wordle as one of the games that turned word puzzles into something millions of people do before they’ve even had their coffee.
It was only a matter of time before someone worked out how to give it a footballing twist and that is exactly what Football Connections has done.
If you’ve played the original Connections, then the format of this game won’t surprise you too much.
How the Game Works
When you load up Football Connections, you are given sixteen footballers’ names to look at, each one shown with both their name and the position that they play tagged underneath it.
On the puzzle that was live when I checked, puzzle #595, the sixteen names on show were Marco van Basten, Christian Ziege, Simon Kjaer, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Tim Cahill, Phil Neville, Gareth Barry, Brad
Friedel, Frank Lampard, Mark Viduka, Mark Bosnich, Ollie Watkins, Mark Schwarzer, Ivan Toney, David Raya and Bryan Mbeumo:
Your job is to work out which four players belong together in each of four hidden groups, select the four names you think fit and then hit ‘Submit’ to find out if you’re right.
The categories themselves can be almost anything, from something as straightforward as which club a player turned out for to something trickier like which players have won the Ballon d’Or or scored over a hundred Premier League goals. Get a full group right and it locks into place on the board, coloured according to how difficult the puzzle-setters reckon it is.
The difficulty levels are as follows:
- Green is the easiest connection
- Blue
- Purple
- Black is the hardest connection
Watch Out for the Overlaps
The single biggest thing to bear in mind is stated right there on the loading screen: connections will never be based upon player positions. That is worth remembering, because every name comes with a position tag sitting underneath it, which can tempt you into grouping four centre-backs together, when the actual link between them has nothing to do with where they played on the football pitch. You will also find plenty of players who look as though they could slot into more than one group, so a name that seems obviously French, say, might turn out to be the answer to a completely different category.
There is only ever one correct solution, so don’t assume you’ve cracked it just because four names look like they belong together. You are only given five lives to play with, shown as a row of hearts at the top of the board, and you lose one every time you submit a wrong combination of four.
If you’re struggling, the ‘Hint’ button will reveal the name of the easiest unsolved category, which at least narrows things down without giving away who actually belongs in it. There are also ‘Shuffle’ and ‘Deselect’ buttons if you want to rearrange the grid or start your selection again.
Coming Back for More
Football Connections runs as a daily puzzle, numbered much like Wordle’s own system, and there is a ‘Previous’ arrow that lets you work your way back through the archive if today’s effort has left you wanting another go.
The people behind it, PlayFootball.Games, run a Discord server and a handful of other social accounts where players compare notes and results, which is very much in keeping with the community that has built up around the New York Times’ original Connections game. It is about testing your football knowledge in a fun and, occasionally, competitive way.
One final thing to bear in mind is that, just as with the original Connections, there will often be red herring selections that you can end up falling foul of. If there are three names that you all think played for Everton, for example, but you can’t find the fourth, bear in mind that the likelihood is that Everton is not the connection.
It is the kind of thing that makes the game both infuriating and addictive, causing you to come back again and again in order to see whether or not you can work it out next time.
