How to play
Transfer
A career, one club at a time, oldest first. Name the player.
The record
You start with one club: the first senior club of somebody’s career, with the years they were there, the league appearances they made and the league goals they scored. Below it sit empty rows, one for each club still to come, so you can see how long the career runs before you guess.
Every wrong guess reveals the next club. Get it right and the run ends where it is, which is the whole scoring idea: the earlier you name them, the more it is worth.
Who can come up
The pool is 450 players drawn from Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and Major League Soccer, capped at seventy-five per league and ranked by how much the English Wikipedia article for each one is actually read over a year. That is a measurement rather than an opinion, and it is the closest thing football has to golf’s world ranking.
A player is filed under the league they played the most games in, not one they passed through. Zlatan Ibrahimović is a Serie A player here on the strength of three hundred games in Italy, whatever the fifty-three he played in England might suggest.
262 of them can be the answer: those in the top 50 of their league with at least 3 senior clubs. A one-club career is a wonderful fact and a terrible puzzle, so those players stay guessable and never come up as the answer.
What the numbers mean
Appearances and goals are leaguefigures, not all competitions, because that is what the record holds. A dash means nobody wrote the number down — it never means zero. Confusing the two is how a game starts telling people things that are not true about real players.
How you win
6 guesses. Name them off fewer clubs and it scores higher.
- The first club is somewhere small
- Read the years, not the badge.Almost nobody starts where they are remembered. A player at a mid-table club in the late nineties who then disappears from the card for four years went somewhere worth going.
- The first club is a giant
- Look at the appearance count.Coming through a famous academy and playing eleven games is a completely different career from playing four hundred, and the number separates them before the next club appears.
- A spell is one year long with few appearances
- Treat it as a loan and keep reading.A short spell between two longer ones is usually a loan, so the clubs either side of it are the ones that describe the player.
- You are three clubs in and have a shortlist
- Guess the one whose last move you are least sure of.A wrong guess buys the next club, so spending one on a player whose remaining career you cannot picture tells you more than confirming one you can.
Nothing about the player's identity is on the card until the run ends: no nationality, no position, no age. The career is the only clue, which is why it carries its numbers.
Scoring
Naming them on the first club 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 career a day, the same one for everybody. Unlimited deals 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.