The cards are built from open football data. Every name that appears as an answer on a card is checked against one of the records below before the card goes up. Nothing is copied from another quiz site and nothing is invented.
Fjelstul World Cup Database
The reference record for the World Cup: every tournament, the matches, the squads, the goals and the penalty shootouts.
- Covers: 1930 to 2022 — 30 tournaments, 22 men's and 8 women's. The most recent edition in the record is the 2022 men's World Cup in Qatar.
- Used for: who has won the World Cup, the finalists, host nations, final venues, Golden Boot winners and the all-time scoring lists.
- Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Author: Joshua C. Fjelstul, Ph.D.
- Source: https://github.com/jfjelstul/worldcup
OpenFootball
Plain-text open data for football competitions, released into the public domain.
- Used for: cross-checking finals, venues, squads and competition formats that sit outside the World Cup record.
- Licence: CC0 1.0, public domain dedication.
- Source: https://github.com/openfootball
Wikipedia page views
This is the only input to the scoring. For each answer the card takes the monthly page views of the subject's English Wikipedia article across the past twelve months and averages them, then ranks the eight answers on that question against each other. The least-viewed quarter of the eight pays 100 points, the next quarter 75, the next 50, and the most-viewed quarter 25.
- Window in use: November 2025 to October 2026 — the twelve most recent complete months the API had published.
- Figures pulled: 15 November 2026.
- Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Page view data is published by the Wikimedia Foundation.
- Source: https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
Because the figure is a twelve-month average rather than a snapshot of one day, a single news spike — a transfer, an award, an anniversary — moves the average a little but rarely moves an answer out of its band.
Two things the scores are not
- They are not my opinion of who is famous. I do not hand out points: the figures decide, and every answer on a card is placed by the same rule.
- They are not a poll of players. Reader votes would reward whichever name was on the last card; the page-view figure rewards the one people know but never get asked about.
Where the football facts stop
The open tournament record above stops at the 2022 World Cup. For anything that depends on the 2026 finals, the card uses the competition record as of 19 July 2026: the 2026 World Cup was won by Spain, who beat Argentina 1–0 after extra time in the final. Football facts on this site are stated as of that date, and no card depends on a result later than it.
If a name on a card is not true for its question, that is a defect. Write it in the comments on the home page or email hello@footbillion.site, and it gets fixed.