You’ve probably heard it sung in disrespect by opposition fans, but far from being a mocking football chant, Who Are Ya? is also a new online football quiz game that tests your player knowledge.
It’s become incredibly popular alongside other games such as Tiki Taka Toe and the Immaculate Grid, and I’m going to explain it here.
It’s a daily game with a new player added every 24 hours, although if you miss a few days you can catch up. If you started after 100 days of the game running you could play all 100 missed games in a single day if you wanted to, but you wouldn’t be able to play any more than that. The players aren’t auto-generated.
It’s a great thing to do with your mates as the game records your stats over time, and it’s also a brilliant way to fill a coffee break at work in place of a crossword. There’s even a Discord group where people compete.
Here’s how it works.
How to Play
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At the simplest level, this is a ‘guess the player’ game built using the same format as Wordle.
You have 8 guesses to get it right, and after each guess the game will reveal colour coded feedback based on the player’s:
- country
- club
- position
- age
- shirt number
From here you make your next guess using this new information to narrow things down.
You can choose to start with a blurred picture of the player you need to guess, giving you a few visual clues, or with a blank space, meaning your first guess is based on absolutely nothing.
I chose a blurred picture:
I didn’t realise the pictures of the players would all be them wearing club colours either, so I ended up wasting my first guess thinking it was Ugarte in his Uruguay shirt.
Nevertheless, I got a bit of feedback, which was that the player I was guessing was a midfielder like Ugarte, so that was something to go on. It’s as far as I got for a while though.
Anything in green means it is correct, anything in grey is incorrect. However, the age and shirt number arrows also give you a higher or lower indication.
For example, after incorrectly guessing Jack Hinshelwood and James Garner, I knew I was looking for someone either 20, 21 or 22 years old:
I went through a few more guesses as you can see, picking two Englishmen even after being told he wasn’t English, and eventually ended up using a few extra clues to work it out.
You can watch adverts in exchange for clues, which is what I did. That’s why you can see an Argentinian flag and a Leicester City badge next to this picture after I finally got it right:
Facundo Buonanotte. I was at a total loss until the Leicester clue was revealed, and I had to use a search engine to double check his name…
At the end the game will show you your stats based on all the games you have played so far:
I only played once, so it shows a 100% success rate, but over time this would no doubt go down. You can see it took me 5 of 8 guesses to get the right player, so you will also get an idea of how quickly you can work them out.
And that’s how to play Who Are Ya?
Different Leagues
The great thing about Who Are Ya? is that you can tell it where to select players from.
You can pick single leagues such as the LaLiga, Serie A, Ligue 1 etc., or players from the big 5 leagues. This means you can focus on what you know, and narrow down the player pool.
It stays current too, so if there are changes during the transfer window these will show up in the game.
The game can be played across loads of other sports too, and there is even a version for celebrities, but as football fans, you will probably be sticking to the football version of Who Are Ya?