Ever since Wordle proved that a simple daily guessing game could become a genuine habit for millions of people, all sorts of variations have sprung up trying to apply the same format to different subjects, whether that’s guessing a country from its outline or a person from their silhouette.

Guess the Football Club takes that idea and applies it to club crests from anywhere in the world, which makes for a rather more geographical challenge than you might expect from a football quiz.

If you know your South American clubs from your Premier League ones, though, this might be for you.

How it Works

You are given six tries to identify a mystery football club, which the game promises ‘can be located anywhere in the world.’ Rather than showing you the crest in full, you’re shown a small, blurred section of it inside a circle, with the idea being that that section grows slightly larger after each guess you make.

The image itself has also been flipped, so any text on the badge is harder to make out even once more of it comes into view. Typing your guess brings up a dropdown of suggestions as you type, each with a small flag next to it, which turns out to be genuinely useful.

That is because plenty of clubs share a name. When I started typing ‘Arsenal’, for instance, I was offered both Arsenal of north London and Arsenal de Sarandí, an Argentine club, so you do need to pick the right one from the list rather than just hitting enter.

It can also help because you might not have known that Arsenal de Sarandí existed, but it could have turned out to be the right answer and you were led to guess Arsenal in the first place because of some subliminal details in the club crest. That wasn’t the case this time around, but it’s something to bear in mind.

Reading the Feedback

Once you’ve submitted a guess, you’re shown five little wheels of information rather than the coloured tiles you might expect from a Wordle-style game.

There’s the guessed club’s nation, an estimated founding year with an arrow showing whether the mystery club was founded earlier or later, the guessed club’s stadium capacity with an arrow showing whether the real answer is higher or lower, a compass arrow pointing in the rough direction of the mystery club from the one you guessed, and finally the distance between the two in kilometres.

When I guessed Arsenal on the puzzle I tried, I was told the mystery club was founded after 1886, had a smaller capacity than Arsenal’s 60,000-odd, sat somewhere to the east of Arsenal and was 2,088 kilometres away, which narrows things down rather more than you’d think.

It can also teach you pretty quickly just how well your geographical knowledge is, given the fact that I had no idea what would have been east of Arsenal and more than 1,000 kilometres away without turning to Google Maps. Hopefully you’re a little better at that than I was…

Choosing Your Difficulty

If you fancy more of a challenge, you can switch from ‘Show Badge’ to ‘Hide Badge’ before you start, which does away with the crest altogether and leaves you entirely reliant on working out the answer from the nation, founding date, capacity, direction and distance clues alone.

It’s a genuinely different way of playing, less about recognising a badge and more about narrowing down a location through deduction. It is also worth pointing out that, unless you happen to be a savant when it comes to club badges, the badge won’t actually help much in a lot of cases.

When I guessed ‘Molde’ with my second entry, for instance, it revealed more of the badge but didn’t help much. Instead, I had to turn to the various different revelations that came underneath, realising that my grasp of both geography and distance was worse than I thought.

It also helped to acknowledge that I don’t know a huge amount about clubs that play in Africa, given that’s where I thought I had to look. When my guess of ‘Cape Town FC’ took me even further away, I began to accept that Guess the Football Club probably isn’t the game for me.

Things to Bear in Mind

The game runs daily and is numbered, with a ‘Previous’ arrow, which lets you dig back through past puzzles if you fancy another go. There’s also a note underneath the game inviting you to email or tweet the makers, PlayFootball.Games, if you spot an issue or think the data is wrong, which suggests the underlying club database is being actively maintained rather than left to go stale.

Given the sheer number of similar such games produced by the company, you don’t need to worry too much if you decide, like I did, that this one really isn’t for you.

There are plenty of other options open to you that you can look to play instead. Sooner or later, you’re bound to find a football game that is more in tune with your personal way of consuming the sport than Guess the Football Club. Alternatively, you might end up in the same boat as me, which involves accepting that my knowledge of the sport is significantly more limited than I had ever realised.

That gives you a freedom that is almost as useful as knowing that Norway is actually not to the east of London in the manner that I thought it was when I decided to guess ‘Molde’.