Brilliantly Bored - Niche Footy Trivia Games are Spawning Everywhere and It’s Bloody Brilliant

Brilliantly Bored - Niche Trivia Games Are Spawning Everywhere and It’s Bloody Brilliant

It’s an age-old question – how do you avoid the inevitable boredom that comes with the territory of the international break? The games are meaningless, sides are rotated to the point of lunacy, and all this when domestic football has only just kicked off again.

The answer, as it is in most cases, is testing your knowledge with trivia, and with football fans being one of the most intellectually inventive sectors on the planet – those chants don’t write themselves, you know – new trivia games are popping up all over the place as fans and casuals alike look to battle back the boredom.

Six Degrees

Football trivia is a cornerstone of being a passionate fan – the better your knowledge, the more of a football follower you are perceived to be, and thus the more respect and credit you earn from your peers.

There is another level, though, and that is self-satisfaction – knowing stuff when quizzed makes the average human being feel good, and even more so when it comes to something they commit their lives to following, the long years of fact reading and information absorbing finally being put to good use.

One of the most satisfying examples of this is the ‘Six Degrees’ game, a game in which you are asked to connect to completely random players by shared club teammates in six guesses or less.

The most detailed example, or the version with the largest database, is the ‘Six Degrees of Jim Leighton’ version, referring to the well-travelled Scottish goalkeeper who, across 636 club appearances, turned out for clubs including Man United, Arsenal, Aberdeen and Dundee, which, alongside his 91 international caps for Scotland, saw him become linked with countless players around Europe.

Thus, the six degrees game was born, and the players you are asked to link can be as mainstream as Coutinho and Bale or as niche as Ali Al-Habsi and Serhou Guirassy (which was today's game, by the way – four connections for me to get it).

Fantasy Forest

Six Degrees is a fairly well-known game that has made a resurgence in recent days, but some are truly new on the scene, and as niche as they come. There are plenty of examples of this, but chief amongst them is the Cooper Challenge, a Nottingham Forest fan challenge that takes inspiration from 38-0-0, the draft-building game that went viral during the World Cup summer.

Made by NFFC Stats, a Forest fanpage known to few other fanbases, the foundation of the game is that you are in charge of Forest back when they were in the Championship, and your goal is to get them promoted using a selection of players from various seasons in which they competed in the second tier.

The game is in-depth – there are two difficulty modes, player ratings, a deep running database of players and a complex algorithm that forces you to make difficult choices that affect your teams' on-field performance during the season simulation.

There are more and more of these season simulation games popping up after the success of 38-0-0, clearly indicating that there is a market for them, and we would argue that those tailored towards specific fanbases are even better, as it allows you to exhibit just how much you remember from when you first started supporting them.

Quick Quizzes

Niche, obscure, fan-made games are all the rage during the international break, but typically, they have a short shelf life, with fans forgetting about them between one season and the next.

However, one thing that will never lack demand is all-round football trivia, covering stats, career paths, achievements, and seasons – it is the ultimate test of any football fan to remember details from specific great sides, campaigns, and tournament runs, with each answer bringing up a vivid, nostalgic memory. That’s half the reason we do it.

Just go into X and search “football trivia” - you’ll be met with a goldmine of quiz pages you’ve never heard of, each with their own unique individual games, challenges and interfaces.

A personal favourite of mine is football darts, the game where you need to get down from 501 to zero when given a category of player (e.g., assists for Chelsea in the Premier League). The catch? Every selection needs to have 180 or fewer of the specified statistic. This is fine; it’s goals or assists, but for appearances, it suddenly becomes a lot harder.

Guessing the player’s career path is another entertaining one, in which you basically compete against yourself to see how early you can guess the hidden player simply going off which clubs they played for early in their career. The more clubs you need to reveal to get the answer, the worse your score is – simple.

442 Goals XI is another supremely simple but entertaining one - you are given a 4-4-2 formation, and your sole responsibility is to populate it with former and current Premier League players that combined have exactly 442 goals between them. Given three choices for each position, it is a fine art that requires intimate knowledge of Premier League goalscoring history to complete.

There are so many others – the creativity of football fans really is boundless – and 90% of them I knew nothing about before deep diving into this article.

Don’t worry, I’ve linked all of these games above - we all need something to kill time this international break - and we will be on the lookout for more additions to this list. Who knows, we even make a part two…