Anyone who spends time in football forums or group chats will be familiar with the old party trick of naming a famous starting eleven from memory, whether that’s a World Cup final or a game from your own club’s history.
Missing XI takes that pub-quiz staple and turns it into a proper daily game, with a Wordle-style twist thrown in to make it considerably harder than simply blurting out eleven names.
In fact, ‘harder’ is probably the operative word here, given the fact that the games that are picked by the algorithm are often not even well-known ones.
How the Game Works
Each day you’re presented with a real fixture from football history, shown with both teams’ badges, the scoreline and the date. On the puzzle I looked at, it was an ‘International Friendly 2010’, with England’s XI beating Mexico 3-1 on 24 May 2010. Below that sits a pixel-art football pitch, on which you’re offered a choice between ‘Normal’ and ‘Hard’ difficulty.
Whichever you pick, a running total in the corner of the screen keeps track of how many of the eleven you’ve correctly identified, and there’s a ‘Give Up’ button on hand, which is extremely tempting.
After you’ve picked your difficulty level, the pitch gets populated with the starting lineup laid out in its actual formation, each player represented by a shirt showing their squad number. The goalkeeper’s shirt is picked out in yellow, the captain has a small ‘c’ underneath their number and, on this particular fixture, three of the shirts also carried a tiny ball icon, which appeared to mark out the players who had scored a goal in the match.
There will obviously be some of you for whom that is a big help. That is not a category into which I can put myself.
The Wordle Twist
Clicking on any shirt, such as when I tried the number 9 spot, doesn’t just ask you to type a surname and be done with it. Instead, it opens up a mini Wordle-style board of its own, complete with an on-screen keyboard, where you enter your guess for that player’s surname letter by letter.
Just as in Wordle, the tiles change colour once you submit a guess: green means a letter is both in the name and in the right spot, yellow means it’s in the name but in the wrong spot and grey rules a letter out altogether. You keep guessing until you either land on the correct surname or head back to the pitch to try a different player instead.
The number of tiles grows and shrinks according to how many letters there are in the player in question’s name. Once you’ve had your guess, the letters that you’ve guessed correctly then appear on the shirt when you go back to the pitch, such as the ‘O’ remaining in place after I’d guessed ‘Rooney’ for one of the forwards.
If you have a sense that a player definitely played in the game but can’t remember where, that can help you to start to narrow down possibilities the more that you guess. Of course, narrowing down possibilities isn’t the same as getting the right answer.
Things to Bear in Mind
Because the fixtures are drawn from right across football history, you’ll need a broader knowledge than just the current crop of players to do well and a match from 2010 can throw up surnames that haven’t crossed your mind in years.
As with the other games from PlayFootball.Games, there’s a ‘Previous’ arrow allowing you to work back through past fixtures, so if one particular match has you stumped, there’s always yesterday’s to fall back on instead. There is certainly no shame in struggling to find the right answers to a match that you’ve never watched, of course.
If you like the idea of the game but don’t remember many of the matches that are thrown up, that is where the back catalogue is your friend. There is nothing wrong with just clicking back and back until you do manage to find a match that you remember watching.
If you have an elephantine memory for previous, obscure football matches, this is a game that will suit you down to the ground. If you don’t, then fear not, there are many other options in the company’s stable that you might just find fit your way of thinking a little bit more readily.
