Career Span — Daily Football Longevity Game
How Career Span works
Five footballers, ordered by how long their careers lasted — not by how old they are. Every instinct that helps elsewhere on this site is noise here. Goals do not lengthen a career, fame does not, and the current club tells you nothing: a retired player can out-span someone still playing.
382 of 766 players qualify, with spans from 3 to 24 years across 22 distinct lengths. 144 of them are still playing, which is what makes a ladder hard: an active career has no end date to reason from.
Two gates, not one. A verified chronology means the years we hold are right — it does not mean we hold them all, because the reconciliation never injects a club a player did not already carry. Measured across the 649 players with a birth date, 15% had a recorded span under 60% of their plausible playing years, and the bias falls systematically on non-European, older and journeyman careers: Arturo Vidal came out at 2 years, Busquets at 2, Deschamps at 6.
Ranking those is not a hard question, it is a false statement about a real person. So a player also needs records covering at least 80% of the window between turning 18 and their last recorded year. Age 18 stands in for a debut and is deliberately conservative — someone who started at 21 looks under-covered and is left out rather than ranked on a number we are unsure of.
Maintained by the PlayFutbol Data Team · First puzzle published September 2026 · Last audited September 14, 2026.
How to play in 3 steps
- 1
Read the five
Five players. No years, no clubs, no hints.
- 2
Order by length
Longest career at the top. Age is not the answer.
- 3
Submit
20 points for each player in exactly the right slot.
How to read a career
- 1. Start with the debut, not the age. A player who broke through at 17 is years ahead of one who arrived at 22, whatever their birthdays say.
- 2. Goalkeepers run long. They peak later and stop later, so a keeper is rarely at the bottom of this ladder.
- 3. Retired does not mean short. Someone who finished five years ago can still have out-lasted a current star by a decade.
- 4. Injury-hit careers compress. A famous name with a thin trophy record often has fewer years than you assume.
- 5. Active players are the trap. Their span keeps growing, so the youngest name on the board is almost never the longest — but it is not always the shortest either.
A worked example
Oliver Kahn, Harry Kane, Aaron Ramsey, Frenkie de Jong, Jonathan David. Kane is the most famous and still playing, which makes him feel like the answer — but Kahn debuted in 1987 and kept going until 2008, twenty-one years, and no one else is close. Kane's seventeen is second precisely because he started at 18 and never stopped. Ramsey, De Jong and David then sort by debut rather than by profile. The famous name is second, not first, and that is the shape of almost every ladder here.
About the authors
Career Span is maintained by the PlayFutbol Data Team. It is the strictest pool on the site because it is the only game whose quantity depends on a career being complete rather than merely correct — two separate things, and conflating them is what produced a two-year Vidal. Where we are not confident we hold most of a career, the player does not appear at all.
Spot a career we have cut short? Email data@playfutbol.app
Frequently asked questions
What is Career Span?
A daily football puzzle. 5 players, ordered by how many years passed between their first club and their last — longest at the top.
Is that the same as age?
No, and that is the whole game. A 34-year-old who turned professional at 22 has a shorter career than a 30-year-old who debuted at 16, and a retired player can easily out-span someone still playing.
How is it scored?
20 points for each player in exactly the right slot, up to 100. One submit, no undo.
Do I see any years while playing?
No — not even a start year, which would hand over half the answer. The full span appears only in the reveal.
How close can two careers be?
Never closer than two years on the same ladder. Adjacent spans one year apart are a coin flip rather than a question, so a board like that is redrawn.
Which players are eligible?
382 of our 766. A player needs a verified career chronology AND records covering at least 80% of their plausible playing years — see below for why that second gate exists.
Why the coverage gate?
Verified chronology means the years we hold are right, not that we hold all of them. Our merge never injects a club a player did not already carry, so a partially covered career comes out short. Without the gate, Arturo Vidal ranked at 2 years and Sergio Busquets at 2 — false statements about real people rather than hard questions.
How is coverage measured?
The recorded span against the window from the player's 18th birthday to their last recorded year. Age 18 is an approximation of a debut and a deliberately conservative one: a player who started at 21 looks under-covered and is excluded rather than ranked on a number we are unsure of.
What counts as the end of a career?
The last year we hold a club spell for. For players still playing it runs to today, and the ladder marks them as active in the reveal.
Why could this game not exist before?
Because the end of a career was not recorded. currentClub used to mean "where they play", so absorbing a retired player's final spell into it discarded the end year and every former player ran to the present day — that is how Puskás came out as a 2023 La Liga winner. Without that field the quantity this game ranks does not exist.
Is there an archive?
Yes. Past ladders are replayable and do not affect your daily streak.
Is it free?
Yes. No signup, no paywall, no ads inside the game.
Related daily football games
- First or Last — order four players by when they joined one club.
- Rank 'Em — order five players by a career stat.
- Higher or Lower — the same comparison, two players at a time.
Career Span is maintained by the PlayFutbol Data Team · 382 eligible careers · 3–24 years · Last audited September 14, 2026 · Report corrections at support@playfutbol.app.