Same Season — Daily Football Team-mates Quiz
How Same Season works
Four footballers. Were they ever all at one club at the same time? Knowing that two players shared a club is easy. Knowing they shared a season is a different question, and it is the one football fans get wrong most often — careers overlap in memory long after they stopped overlapping on a team sheet.
Every group is drawn from an index of 2,383 evidenced club-seasons built from a 766-player database. Of those, 580 hold at least 4 players — enough to field a round — across 46 clubs and seasons from 1950 to 2026.
A shared season is the intersection of two date ranges, which is why this game could not have existed before September 2026: 31.9% of our spell years were invented until then, and an intersection of two invented ranges declares strangers to be team-mates. Only verified careers are indexed.
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 four
Four players and their flags. The club is not shown.
- 2
Answer yes or no
Were all four at one club in one season?
- 3
See the dates
The reveal names the club, the season, and who was there in a different era.
How to spot the odd one
- 1. Find the club first. Three of the four always point at one side. Name it, then ask whether the fourth fits the years rather than the badge.
- 2. Ages are the fastest tell. A 21-year-old next to three players who peaked a decade ago is the odd one, whatever club they all share.
- 3. Beware the long-servers. A one-club veteran overlaps with almost everyone, so they are rarely the answer — check the short spells instead.
- 4. Nationality clusters are a trap. Four Brazilians at the same club feels right and says nothing about the dates.
- 5. Answers alternate. If the last one was a yes, this one is a no — but the group is still built to make you doubt it.
A worked example
Reus, Pulisic, Isak and Adeyemi. Every one of them is a Dortmund player, and the group reads as a squad immediately — that is the trap. Reus, Pulisic and Isak were all there around 2018-19; Adeyemi did not arrive until 2022, by which time Pulisic and Isak had gone. The club is not the question, and the badge is the least useful thing on the screen.
About the authors
Same Season is maintained by the PlayFutbol Data Team. The club-season index is rebuilt from Wikidata spell statements, and it exposed a real defect the day it was written: a merge rule meant to join a loan to the permanent move that followed it was also joining genuine returns years apart, so Van Persie read as a Feyenoord player from 2001 to 2019. Forty-eight careers carried that shape; seven do now, and all seven are real loan-heavy careers.
Spot two players wrongly called team-mates? Email data@playfutbol.app
Frequently asked questions
What is Same Season?
A daily football puzzle. You get 6 groups of 4 players and answer one question about each: were all four at the same club in the same season?
Are the wrong groups just random players?
Never. Every "no" is a near miss — three of the four really did share a club and a season, and the fourth was at that same club in a different era. The club is right, the names look right together, and only the dates say otherwise.
Why build it that way?
Because a "no" made of four unrelated players is spotted instantly and teaches nothing. A near miss makes you check the dates, which is the whole skill the game is testing.
How is it scored?
Even split across the 6 groups, up to 100. Answers alternate yes and no, so a run of six of the same is not possible — a coin flip that produced six yeses would make the game look broken.
What does the reveal tell me?
The club, the season, and for a "no" exactly when the odd player was actually there. That fact is usually more memorable than the score.
What counts as "the same season"?
A season is named by the year it started — 2015 means 2015-16. Two players share a season when both of their spells at that club cover it.
What about loans?
Wikidata records a loan as the player being at both clubs at once, so a loanee legitimately appears in two squads for one season. That is why the reveal says their spells overlapped rather than claiming both were in the same dressing room.
How many squads are in the pool?
580 club-seasons with at least 4 players we can evidence, across 46 clubs and seasons from 1950 to 2026.
Can two groups come from the same club?
Not in one day. The second group would give itself away, because the names would already be familiar from the first.
How do you know the overlaps are real?
A season overlap is the intersection of two date ranges, and until September 2026 31.9% of our spell years were invented — the intersection would have been meaningless. Only players whose chronology is verified against Wikidata are used.
Is there an archive?
Yes. Past rounds 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
- Teammate Bridge — name the player who links two others.
- Six Degrees — build a chain of team-mates between two footballers.
- Guess the Year — date a transfer from the two clubs involved.
Same Season is maintained by the PlayFutbol Data Team · 580 playable club-seasons · Last audited September 14, 2026 · Report corrections at support@playfutbol.app.