About DailyFoot
DailyFoot is a free daily football grid: 9 cells, two clues per cell, one international footballer who satisfies both. It is made by one person, Eliott Gandiolle, an independent developer in Paris. There is no company behind it, no investors and no editorial team, so when this page says “we” it means one developer and a build script.
What the game is
Every day, each edition publishes the same 3×3 grid for everyone: three row clues, three column clues, and 9 cells. A cell needs a player from that national team who satisfies both its clues, each player can be used once, and 3 mistakes end the day.
A cell is worth 100 points minus the share of players who picked the same name, so a well-known answer pays little and a deep cut pays almost everything: a perfect grid is 900 points. There is no account, no sign-up and no download, and everyone gets the same grid on the same day, so scores are actually comparable. The last 180 days keep their own page in the archive.
There are 12 editions in all, ten national teams plus a World Cup edition and a General edition that mixes every pool, played in 7 interface languages.
Who makes it
Eliott Gandiolle, an independent developer in Paris, France. I build a small family of free daily games in my own time. I write the code, assemble and correct the datasets, and maintain the Lab pages. The formal publisher details, as French law requires them, are on the legal notice.
I am not a journalist or a statistician, and this site is not a research output. It is a game built carefully on other people's published data, which is why the sourcing below matters more than my opinion does.
Where the player data comes from
The pools are assembled from named open sources: Wikidata (CC0) for national-team squads, caps, goals, clubs, birth years and honours; Wikipedia for notability, through each player's count of language editions, and for the honours Wikidata records unevenly; and the open transfermarkt-datasets project as an independent cross-check on modern players, which is silent on anyone before about 2010. The Lab's height rankings use Wikidata's height property, and its season projections are computed from ESPN's public standings API.
Nothing is scraped straight into the game. Every pool is a checked-in file that a human has read: the ingest proposes, and a set of 293 distinct clues is then generated against 4146 players across all editions. A health check runs on every test run and enforces thirteen invariants, each of which exists because the problem it looks for shipped at least once, from two spellings of one club silently becoming two different clues to the same clue landing three days apart.
Where a fact is missing rather than known, the player is left out of that clue instead of being counted as a zero.
How the daily grid is generated
The day is derived from the date and the edition's epoch alone. There is no clock and no randomness at play time, so everyone in the world gets the same grid. Clue selection is seeded from the day number, and every published grid has been checked by a bipartite matching at build time to guarantee at least one solution with 9 distinct players, plus a rule that keeps the same clue from returning within three days.
Grids are precomputed and committed, so a later change to the data cannot rewrite a puzzle somebody has already played.
What this site does not claim
DailyFoot is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to FIFA, UEFA, any national federation, any club, Wikimedia, Transfermarkt or ESPN. Names and data are used under their own terms and credited where they are used.
The data ages. Caps and goals grow every international window, players move clubs every transfer window, and a source can simply be wrong. Career totals here are a snapshot of the last refresh, not a live feed, and a handful of players in every pool will be a cap or two behind. Honours and club lists for older players are the least reliable part.
If you find an error, tell me and I will fix it or say why I have not. Corrections are the only feedback that changes the site the same week.
How it is paid for
DailyFoot is free and always has been. No advertising runs on it today and it earns no advertising revenue; the only income is voluntary Ko-fi donations, which buy no feature and no advantage. The intention is to add third-party advertising to cover hosting, and the legal notice and privacy policy will be updated before that happens rather than after. Nothing is sold to players and no feature is withheld from anyone.
Contact
Corrections, questions, press, or a note about a player who is in the wrong pool: write to dailymetrolive@gmail.com and it reaches me directly. There is no support team and no ticket system, so replies are personal and occasionally slow.