About Footballdle

Footballdle is a free daily word game for Premier League football fans. Each day a hidden six-letter player surname is chosen from the current 2025/26 Premier League season — your job is to guess it in up to six tries. After every guess the tiles change colour to reveal how close you are, Wordle-style. There are no ads chasing you around the page, no account required, and no paywalls. Just a clean daily puzzle that takes a couple of minutes to play.

Where the idea came from

The game started as a lockdown side project. Wordle had just gone viral and, like a lot of developers, I found myself wondering what it would look like applied to a subject I actually cared about. Football seemed obvious. Premier League surnames have a satisfying mix of common English names, Iberian double-barrelled ones, and everything in between — exactly the kind of variation that makes a word game interesting without making it impossible.

The first version was rough: a static HTML file shared in a WhatsApp group with a few friends. People kept playing, kept sharing their results, and kept asking for a streak counter. That was enough reason to keep building.

How it works

Every puzzle uses a six-letter Premier League surname drawn from the active 2025/26 season squad list. Answers are selected in a shuffled order so the same name doesn't come up twice until the full list has been exhausted. The puzzle resets at midnight UK time — everyone around the world gets the same answer on the same day, which is part of what makes it fun to compare scores.

Your streak, statistics, and game history are stored locally in your browser using localStorage. Nothing is sent to a server and no personal data is collected. The downside is that clearing your browser data will reset your stats — the upside is that there is genuinely nothing to sign up for.

Challenge mode

Finishing the daily puzzle unlocks Challenge mode — a faster, unlimited version of the game. In Challenge mode the answer is a five-letter Premier League surname and you play against a 45-second countdown. There are no limits on how many times you can play, so it's useful for practising letter placement and improving your opening guesses ahead of the next daily puzzle.

World Cup 2026

Footballdle also runs a special World Cup 2026 edition. Rather than a fixed-length Premier League name, each daily puzzle picks a surname from the full pool of players across all 48 nations competing at the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The player list covers over 1,000 players with no surname-length restriction, so it's a significantly harder and more international challenge. Wrong guesses come with additional clues — the player's continent, country, position, and year of birth — helping you triangulate the answer across cultures and languages you might be less familiar with.

Keeping the player list accurate

The Premier League squad list is refreshed at the start of each season and updated again during the January transfer window. If a player moves clubs mid-season they stay in the pool — what matters is that they played in the Premier League that season, not which shirt they finished in. The World Cup 2026 list was compiled from official FIFA squad submissions covering all 48 qualified nations and is updated as squads are confirmed.

Player data isn't perfect. Surnames get transliterated differently across sources, some squad lists lag behind transfer deadlines, and occasionally a six-letter name slips through that most fans wouldn't recognise. If you spot an error or a missing player, please get in touch — the list genuinely gets better every time someone flags something.

Who made it

Footballdle was built and is maintained by Dan, a developer and football fan based in the UK. It started as a personal project and remains one — there's no team, no VC funding, and no grand monetisation plan. The site is supported by a small number of display ads and the occasional coffee bought through the link at the top of the page. Both are genuinely appreciated and help cover hosting costs.

The game is built with Nuxt and Vue, deployed on Vercel. Player data comes from the football-data.org API.

Inspiration and credit

Footballdle takes direct inspiration from Wordle, created by Josh Wardle and now owned by the New York Times. The colour-coded feedback mechanic is Wordle's — applied here to the world of football rather than the dictionary. Footballdle is not affiliated with the Premier League, FIFA, any football club, or the New York Times.

Contact

For missing players, bug reports, or anything else: footballdleadmin@gmail.com

Response times vary — this is a one-person operation run in spare time — but every message gets read and player suggestions are usually added within a few days.