How to play
Dossier
A scouting file with the name redacted. Six columns, eight guesses.
The file
Guess any footballer in the list and their own file is laid beside the mystery player’s, column by column. Each cell shows what yourguess says — which gives nothing away, because you typed that name and could look it up — and colours it by how close it came.
- NATION — nationality. Green for the same nation, amber for the same confederation.
- LEAGUE — league. Green or grey: the six competitions sit in five countries with nothing in between to be half-right about.
- POS — position. Green for the same line of the team, amber for the next line along.
- BORN — year of birth. Green within 2, amber within 6, and the arrow points the way the mystery player lies.
- CLUBS — senior clubs. Green within the exact number, amber within 2, and the arrow points the way the mystery player lies.
- GOALS — league goals. Green within 10, amber within 50, and the arrow points the way the mystery player lies.
The file note
After 5 misses a note is added to the file: the decades the player’s senior career ran across. It will not name anybody, and combined with three or four coloured columns it usually leaves a shortlist you can actually work through.
Who can come up
All 450 players in the soccer pool are guessable — the same pool Transfer uses, drawn from the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and Major League Soccer, capped at seventy-five per league and ranked by how much each player’s English Wikipedia article is actually read over a year.
270 of them can be the answer: those inside the top 50 of their league whose file has every column filled in. 47 players have at least one league spell nobody recorded a goal tally for; their goals column reads as a dash, they stay guessable, and they never come up as the mystery player — otherwise one of the six columns would be blank for every guess and the board would be five columns wide without saying so.
What the numbers mean
Goals are league goals in those six competitions, not all competitions and not internationals, because that is what the record holds. Clubs is every senior club a player has been under contract at, loans included. A dash means nobody wrote the number down; it never means zero.
How you win
8 guesses. Fewer guesses scores higher.
- Your first guess
- Spend it on somebody ordinary rather than somebody great.A superstar is an outlier on four columns at once, so almost every cell comes back grey. A mid-career forward from a mid-sized nation splits the pool much more evenly.
- Nation comes back amber
- Switch continent within the confederation, not country.Amber means the same confederation, and two thirds of the pool is UEFA, so an amber on a European guess has barely narrowed anything. An amber on a CONMEBOL or CAF guess has narrowed it enormously.
- Clubs comes back high
- Look for a journeyman rather than a one-club great.Careers in this pool run from one club to nineteen. A high arrow on clubs rules out most of the famous names immediately, which is a bigger cut than it looks.
- You have the league, the position and the era
- Guess the name you are least certain of, not the one you like.Confirming somebody you already half-believe teaches you little. The guess that splits your shortlist teaches you most, and you only have eight.
No club is ever named on the board. The file describes a player; it never describes where they played, which is the question Transfer asks instead.
Scoring
Naming them first guess is a hundred; each further guess is worth less, and running out scores nothing. The shared leaderboard shows it as a percentage, on the same scale as every other guessing game here.
One file a day, the same one for everybody. Unlimited opens another whenever you want more.
Golfle is an independent game platform and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Major League Soccer, FIFA, UEFA, any club, or any players association. Club and player names are used for identification and factual game context.