The Academy Quiz is the gentlest way into Daily Play. Every day we pick seven professional footballers and show you their career path — club by club, season by season — with the names hidden. Your job is to work out who walked that path. Instead of typing a name you tap one of four options, which makes the whole quiz playable with one thumb on a phone during a coffee break.
A career path turns out to be a surprisingly strong fingerprint. Almost nobody remembers squad numbers, but most football fans recognise a shape: a youth spell at a Dutch academy, a breakout season in Portugal, six years in the Premier League, a late move to Saudi Arabia. Academy hands you that shape and asks you to put a name to it. Get it wrong and you still come away with something — the reveal card shows the player's photo, position, nationality and a fun fact, so a miss is a small football lesson rather than a dead end.
Today's quiz is identical for every visitor in the world and resets at midnight UTC. That is deliberate: it means "6/7" is a score you can actually compare with friends, drop into a group chat and argue about. The seven players are drawn from our published catalogue, and today's daily-riddle answers are deliberately excluded from the pool — playing Academy first can never spoil the harder modes.
Daily Play is built around one football question asked three ways. Academy, the entry tier, gives you four names to choose from. Pro keeps the same football but makes you pick from an autocomplete, so the name has to be in your head rather than on the screen. Legend gives you nothing at all: an empty box and your memory. Same knowledge, three very different amounts of pressure.
The tiers are not a ladder you are forced to climb. Plenty of people play Academy on a Monday commute and Legend on a Sunday afternoon, and your daily streak counts the same either way — finishing an Academy quiz keeps it alive exactly like a completed daily riddle does. Nobody should lose progress for picking the mode that fits the twenty minutes they actually have.
Moving up is one tap: the results screen at the end of every quiz offers the day's Pro challenge, and because today's riddle answers never appear in Academy, you go into it unspoiled. If Pro turns out to be a step too far, nothing is lost — the Academy quiz you already finished has banked its points and secured the day's streak.
Every correct answer starts from a base of 1,000 points and is then adjusted by three things: how hard the player is, how quickly you answered, and how cleanly. Players in the catalogue are graded Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert — worth 0.8x, 1.0x, 1.3x and 1.6x — so identifying an obscure 1990s left-back is worth considerably more than identifying a Ballon d'Or winner.
Speed matters, but not brutally. Ten points come off for each second you spend on a question, and that penalty is capped at 80% of the base, so a correct answer always earns something even if you stared at the screen for five minutes. Answering inside thirty seconds adds a speed bonus on top, and every correct Academy answer has a floor of 50 points before multipliers — a slow, right answer is never worth nothing.
Then the tier multiplier lands: Academy answers are scored at 50% of their value, Pro at 75%, Legend at 100%. That is what keeps the leaderboard honest, because tapping the right name out of four really is easier than typing it from memory. Academy has its own ranking, so you are measured against other Academy players rather than against Legend typists, and practice rounds you finish count toward that total too.
Here is what a question actually looks like. The card shows a youth spell at Sporting CP, a transfer to Manchester United in 2003, Real Madrid from 2009, then Juventus. Four names sit underneath. You solve that one on the first line and the whole question takes three seconds — Academy opens with its easiest players on purpose, because an on-ramp should feel like an on-ramp.
The interesting questions look more like this: two mid-table Bundesliga clubs in the mid-2000s, a single season in Turkey, then a long spell in MLS. Now all four names belong to defenders of roughly the same era, because that is how the quiz builds its wrong answers — decoys are chosen to share the subject's position first and their playing years second, never picked at random. "Which of these is even a defender?" is not a shortcut that works here.
What does work is reading the dates before the crests. The years a career starts and ends narrow four names down faster than the clubs do, because you usually know roughly when a player played even when you have forgotten where. Then look for the club that does not fit the obvious story — the loan spell, the odd year abroad. That outlier is normally the detail your memory actually kept.
If you have never played a football guessing game before, start here rather than at the daily riddle. Four options remove the cruellest failure mode of typed games: knowing exactly who the player is and losing the point anyway because you spelled the name differently than the database did. Academy never punishes spelling. It only asks whether you recognise the career.
It is also the fastest way to learn the catalogue. Seven questions take two or three minutes, and every reveal adds a player to your mental index — including the three decoys you rejected, who are real players from the same position and era. After a couple of weeks of Academy, the autocomplete in Pro stops feeling like a memory test and starts feeling like a formality.
And when the seven questions run out, they do not really run out: practice rounds keep generating fresh quizzes for the rest of the day, built the same way and scored the same way, and a finished practice round counts toward your Academy total and your streak just like the daily one. Come back after midnight UTC for a new set of seven — or move up to Pro whenever four options stop being a challenge.