How a daily football puzzle is made
Every Triviverse question comes from the same database of real football records. How that data is collected, how a puzzle is chosen, and how we make sure it is fair.
Triviverse has eleven football games, and between them they ask thousands of questions. None of those questions is written by hand. They are all generated from one database of football records, and checked against that same database when you answer. This article explains how that works, what the data covers, and the checks that stop a puzzle from being unfair.
One source of truth
All of the football data on the site comes from Transfermarkt, the largest public database of football careers. We collect each player’s season-by-season league record in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and the Champions League. We also collect their international caps and goals, their transfer history and their honours.
That raw data is turned into a single “canonical” model. It has one record per player, per club, per competition and per season, and every game reads from it. The key rule is that no game keeps its own private list of facts. If Career Path, Tic-Tac-Toe and Higher or Lower all need to know whether a player played for Everton, they all ask the same record. A fix in one place reaches every game at once.
Knowing who is who
The hardest problem is not stats. It is identity. Football is full of players who share a name. There are two famous Brazilian Ronaldos, two English players called Danny Rose, and countless players whose names are spelled differently in different countries. If the data mixed two players up, a question could have a wrong answer, or reject a right one.
Every player therefore has a permanent internal id tied to his Transfermarkt record, and every name or alternative spelling points to that id. When you type a name, the game resolves it to an id first, and the checks then use the id. That is why typing “Ronaldo” offers you a choice when it is ambiguous, rather than guessing.
Fair difficulty: recognisability
A database of tens of thousands of players will always have obscure answers. A question whose only answer is a reserve full-back from 1994 would be correct, but nobody would enjoy it. So each player gets a recognisability score, based on how much he played and at what level. Daily puzzles only use players above a threshold. Your answers are still checked against the full database, so naming an obscure but correct player always counts.
Some games use that score directly. In Football Pointless, more recognisable answers score more points, and in Pointless points are bad, so the aim is to find a correct answer that few people would think of.
Solvability checks
Before a daily puzzle goes live it has to pass checks specific to its game:
- Every Tic-Tac-Toe square must have at least two well-known answers, so no square depends on one obscure player.
- Every Connections board must have exactly one valid solution, with no player who could fit two groups.
- Every Bingo card must be completable inside the time limit with the players it deals you.
- Every Tenable list is taken directly from the records, so the top ten really is the top ten.
One matchday for everyone
The daily puzzles change at midnight UK time, for everyone, wherever they are. That is a deliberate choice. A shared puzzle only works as a shared experience if everyone gets the same one, so you can compare scores with friends and in leagues. The puzzle for each day is chosen in advance. In games such as Football 501, the daily pool also rotates through clubs, so the same club does not come up several days in a row.
Keeping the data current
Football data goes out of date quickly. Players transfer, score, retire and change national team. We refresh the full dataset after each transfer window and at points in the season, then rebuild every game from it. The articles on this site are dated for the same reason. A Premier League total quoted in October will be different by May.
When something is wrong
Data generated from records can still be wrong. A transfer can be dated incorrectly at source, a youth team can be mistaken for a senior club, or an international cap can be credited to the wrong player. When you spot one, tell us which game it was, the date, and what you expected. Corrections are made in the underlying data rather than by patching one question, so the fix reaches every game.
Two examples from October 2026: Football Tenable’s England caps list was missing several goalkeepers including Peter Shilton, because one data source had gaps. It now comes from Transfermarkt’s all-time record tables. And Career Path had been showing some youth and reserve sides as senior clubs. They are now removed, and 113 affected puzzles were rebuilt.
Sources and method
This article describes how the site works as of November 2026. The data pipeline is documented in more detail on the About page.