Football trivia, answered on the map

Where was Erling Haaland born? Most people say Norway. The answer is Leeds, where his father was playing for Leeds United at the time, and the family moved to Bryne when he was three. That gap between what you think you know and the place itself is the whole idea behind SpotGuesser.

SpotGuesser is a free football trivia game we launched with its first daily match on 29 September 2026. Every day there are five questions, the same for everyone, and every answer is a place. You don't pick from a list. You spin a 3D globe, drop a pin, and score by how close you land.

Why a map beats multiple choice

A multiple-choice quiz gives a wild guess a one-in-four chance and gives a near miss nothing. Real football knowledge rarely works like that. You might not know the exact town a player was born in, but you know the country, maybe the region, maybe the club down the road.

Answering on a map turns that partial knowledge into points. Knowing the country is worth something, knowing the region is worth a lot more, and knowing the city is worth nearly everything. Every guess becomes a judgement call rather than a coin toss, which is what keeps a five-minute game interesting right up to the reveal.

How a guess is scored

Each question is worth 100 points. The distance between your pin and the answer is measured in a straight line across the surface of the earth, and the further off you are, the fewer points you keep. The published scale looks like this:

• Exact: 100
• 50 miles off: 98
• 100 miles off: 95
• 250 miles off: 85
• 500 miles off: 70
• 1,000 miles off: 50
• 2,500 miles off: 25
• 5,000 miles off: 5
• The other side of the world: 0

The shape matters more than any single number. The curve is almost flat for the first hundred miles, so a pin on the big city next to a small town still scores in the high 90s. It only starts to drain quickly once you are hundreds of miles out. In practice that means you are rewarded for knowing roughly where something is, and you are never punished much for not knowing a suburb's name.

Each question's score gets a colour too: green for 90 to 100, amber for 50 to 89, red for 1 to 49, and grey for an extreme miss. Those colours are what you share at the end.

One round, start to finish

For the screenshots on this page we replayed the 4 October match from Past games. The first question asked which city is home to the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard. We put the pin north of Lyon, near Bourg-en-Bresse. The answer was Saint-Étienne, 58 miles away, which scored 97. The reveal then explained that the ground is nicknamed Le Chaudron, the Cauldron, and that Saint-Étienne's green-shirted side of the 1970s reached the 1976 European Cup final.

That reveal is the part we care about most. Every answer comes with a few lines on why the place matters, so even a bad guess teaches you something. Five questions later the round ends on a score card, a score for each question, and a chart showing where your total sits among everyone who played the same five.

Replays like ours are kept separate on purpose. Playing an old match doesn't touch your streak and isn't counted in the live score charts, so Past games is there for catching up and practising, not for padding a record.

Playing with friends

A daily game is better when someone else is playing the same questions. SpotGuesser has two ways to do that, and neither needs an account.

• Challenges. Create one, add up to seven friends by name and send the link. Everyone plays that day's match whenever they have five minutes. Once you've played you see the standings, the closest guess, the biggest miss and every player's pin on the map for each question. When it's over, Rematch sets up the next one.
• Sharing. Share my score sends your total and a coloured square for each question, with a link to play the same five. Not a single answer is given away, so it's safe to post in the group chat on the day.

What comes next is up to players

Football is the first topic, not the only one planned. The homepage runs a vote between History, Landmarks, Movies, Music, Formula 1 and Food, and the favourite gets built next. At the time of writing Formula 1 is in front, but it's early and the vote is open. You can change your mind as often as you like.

Get better at it

The SpotGuesser team has written up a guide to pinning strategies built on five real questions from the first week: when to pin the big city, when to aim for the middle of a region, and when to commit to one answer instead of splitting the difference. It's worth five minutes before your next round.

Play today's match

If you'd rather read how it was put together, there's a full case study on the project.