Pub Football Trivia

What this is

Pub Football Trivia is nine football quiz games that run in your phone’s browser — no app store, no download, no account. It was built for one specific moment: a table full of people disagreeing about something footballing, and nobody quite able to prove it. One phone comes out, one person hosts, and the argument gets settled by the numbers.

Every round is generated from a football database rather than drawn from a fixed list of questions, so a game you played yesterday gives you a different board today. You pick the competition and the era before you start, which means you can play to what you actually know — the Premier League seasons you lived through, or La Liga in the years you followed it — instead of being tested on somebody else’s idea of general knowledge.

The nine games

• Top 10 — Guess the top ten by a chosen stat.
• Career Path — Guess the player from their clubs.
• Name the League — Name every club against the clock.
• Head to Head — Pick whoever ranks higher. Keep the streak.
• Stat XI — Build the XI ranked by a stat.
• Played for All — Who turned out for every club shown?
• Starting 11 — Name a real match line-up.
• 501 — Count down from 501 to a checkout.
• On Target — Stack goals into the target band.

How a game goes

Pick a game and you’ll be asked who’s playing — just you, or a table of names — then which competition and which era. From there it’s typing: names go in through a search box that copes with spelling, nicknames and the accents nobody can produce on a phone keyboard. In most games a wrong guess costs you nothing, so you’re free to think out loud and work the board from both ends; in Career Path and Head to Head guessing has a price, which is what gives those two their nerve.

Hints are there for a row that refuses to come. Spending one buys you a clue — a nationality, a position, a first letter — and you still have to type the answer yourself, which is the point. Finish a game and you get a result screen worth arguing over.

What we’ve been writing

The same dataset the games are built from answers a lot of questions nobody usually asks of it, and those go on the blog: not who scored the most, which everyone knows, but who played the most minutes, who was booked the most, who spent an entire career at one club, and who managed to score in all four of Europe’s big leagues. Every post is built on a table computed from our own records, states the seasons it covers, and says plainly what it leaves out.

• The best single-season assist records in Europe — The creators' equivalent, and a much more evenly spread list than the goals table.
• The best single-season goal hauls in Europe's big four leagues — One season, one competition, and the outlier campaigns that reset what was thought possible.
• The most Bundesliga appearances since 2000 — Thirty-four games a season instead of thirty-eight — which makes every total here worth more than it looks.
• The Bundesliga's most creative players since 2000 — A record held by a player who never had a position anyone could name.
• La Liga's best goals-per-90 records since 2000 — Two players at the top, both above a goal a game, for the better part of a decade each.
• Who has made the most La Liga appearances since 2000? — The Spanish league's great survivors — and not one of them is who you would guess.

There are more of them here, and they double as study material: most of them end with the reason a particular kind of board is hard and what to think about when one stalls.

Where the answers come from

Rounds are built from a database of more than 27,000 players and over 115,000 season stat lines, covering six leagues — the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, the Scottish Premiership and the Brasileirão — every season from 1992/93 to 2025/26, plus the finals of the Champions League, the FA Cup, the Scottish Cup, the World Cup, the Euros and the Copa Libertadores. That is deliberately the whole premise: these are checkable answers, not vibes, so a disputed round can be looked up rather than shouted about. If you spot something wrong — and with numbers this old, in this volume, you eventually will — mail pubfootballtrivia@gmail.com and it gets fixed for everyone.

Questions people ask

Is it free?

Yes — every game, the daily, and multiplayer are free and always have been. The app is paid for by ads, and a one-off purchase removes them if you'd rather not see any.

Do I need to download anything?

No. It runs in your browser. Add it to your home screen and it opens full-screen and behaves like an installed app, but there's nothing to install and no account to make.

Can I play with other people?

Yes, and it's the way it was designed to be played: one person hosts on their phone, reads the prompts out, and the table takes turns. Add everyone's names before you start and the app keeps score.

How far back does the data go?

Decades, depending on the competition — far enough that the older seasons are genuinely hard. Recent Premier League is the gentlest starting point; a First Division season from the nineties is where people discover what they actually remember.

What happens if a question looks wrong?

Mail pubfootballtrivia@gmail.com with the game and what you saw. Football data is messy — transfers, loans, name spellings and cup competitions all disagree with each other across sources — and corrections get applied for everyone.

More on the games in the how-to-play guides, the leaderboards behind them in the football records, the rest of the numbers on the stats blog, who makes this and where the numbers come from on the about page, and what we do with your data in the privacy policy.