Footy Grid is a free daily football grid puzzle in which you fill nine cells, each sitting where a row club crosses a column club, with a player who turned out for both. Guesses are unlimited and cost nothing, so the only real constraint is what you can remember. Any player in the dataset counts — 1,605 of them, drawn from seventeen clubs across the top five European leagues over the ten seasons from 2016-17 — and an obscure answer is worth exactly what an obvious one is. Fill all nine, or give up to see the rest. The grid rotates at midnight UTC and everyone gets the same one; three levels are offered, and playing any of them marks the game done for the day.
Each cell inherits a club from its row and a club from its column, and wants one player who satisfies both. There is no requirement that the two spells were consecutive or that either was long — an appearance for each is enough. Most cells have several valid answers; you only ever need one.
No. A cell filled with a fringe squad player counts the same as one filled with the name everybody thinks of first. There is no rarity score and no bonus for being unusual, which means the fastest route through a grid is whichever name arrives in your head — the game is not testing how clever the answer is.
Give up at any point and the remaining cells are revealed. Guessing costs nothing, so there is no reason to stop early; wrong names simply do not stick. A finished grid and an abandoned one both end the game for the day, and both go into your record.
The seventeen clubs Backheel is built around: seven from the Premier League, three from La Liga, two from the Bundesliga, four from Serie A and one from Ligue 1. Coverage runs across ten seasons from 2016-17, which is deep enough that most club pairs have real overlap.
Work the pair with the most transfer traffic between them first — one remembered move often fills two cells, since the same player usually satisfies a third club as well.
Football Bingo poses the same kind of constraint one player at a time, and Connections turns it inside out by giving you the players and hiding the trait.