Connections is a free daily football grouping puzzle in which you split sixteen players into the four groups of four hiding among them. Every group shares exactly one trait — a club, a nationality, a squad, an era — and the grid is built so that names deliberately fit more than one of them. Only one full solution exists. Tap four, submit, and keep going: mistakes are counted but not punished, and the round runs until all four groups are found or you give up and see the ones you missed. The players come from the seventeen clubs Backheel covers, 1,605 of them over the ten seasons from 2016-17, and how well known they are is what separates Easy from Hard. One new grid per level each day at midnight UTC.
On the face of it, often. A Brazilian who played for Chelsea sits plausibly in a nationality group and a club group at once, and the grid is assembled to make that happen. Only one arrangement resolves all sixteen names at the same time, so a group that looks right in isolation is the thing to distrust.
No. Wrong submissions are counted and shown, but they cost you nothing else and the round continues until all four groups are out. That is deliberate: the grid is meant to be worked out rather than survived, and a four-mistake limit would turn a puzzle about traits into a puzzle about nerve.
A shared club, a shared nationality, a shared squad, or a shared era. They come out of the dataset rather than being written by hand, so the link is always something checkable about the sixteen players in front of you and never a piece of trivia or wordplay. Nationality here is football nationality, not birthplace.
Solve the group you are least sure about last — start from the four names that fit exactly one trait, because they are what pins the players who fit two.
Football Bingo and Footy Grid work the same trait matching in the other direction: you are handed the fact and asked for the player.