How to use these
Thirty football questions in four rounds: the World Cup, the laws of the game, clubs and leagues, and a last round of records and oddities that ends on an estimation question you can use as a tiebreak. Each round starts easy and gets harder, so a group of casual fans can stop a round halfway and still have had a fair go. Read them out with a twenty-second answer window, or type them into a community quiz so everyone answers on their own phone and the score keeps itself.
Football goes out of date faster than almost any other quiz subject. Scoring charts change every weekend, title counts change every May, and a question about the current transfer record is wrong by the next window. So these questions stick to what is settled: who won a particular final, when a rule came in, what happened on one particular night. Where a number is only true as of a certain date, the question names the date. And for readers in the United States: this is soccer, and the laws are the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
Round one: the World Cup
1. Which country hosted and won the first World Cup, in 1930? Uruguay, who beat Argentina 4–2 in the final in Montevideo. Only thirteen teams took part and just four came from Europe, because the crossing by ship took about two weeks each way and most European associations decided it was not worth it.
2. In 1950 Brazil needed only a draw in the deciding match of their own World Cup. Who beat them 2–1 at the Maracanã? Uruguay, again. The official attendance was more than 170,000 and the real figure was probably nearer 200,000; the defeat is still known as the Maracanazo.
3. Which team did West Germany beat in the 1954 final in Bern, and why was it such a shock? Hungary, the "Golden Team" of Ferenc Puskás, who had not lost a match in four years and had beaten the Germans 8–3 earlier in the same tournament. West Germany came back from 2–0 down to win 3–2, and in Germany the match is still called das Wunder von Bern, the Miracle of Bern.
4. Who scored a hat-trick in the 1966 final at Wembley, and which of his goals is still argued about? Geoff Hurst, in England's 4–2 win over West Germany after extra time. His second hit the underside of the crossbar and bounced down on or near the line; the Soviet linesman, Tofiq Bahramov, signalled a goal, and Germans have called any disputed goal-line goal a "Wembley-Tor" ever since. Hurst was the only man to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final until Kylian Mbappé matched him in 2022.
5. After their third title in 1970, Brazil were allowed to keep the original World Cup trophy for good. What was it called? The Jules Rimet Trophy, named after the FIFA president who set up the tournament. It was stolen from the Brazilian football federation's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro in 1983 and has never been recovered.
6. In which match did Diego Maradona score the "Hand of God" goal? The 1986 quarter-final against England at the Azteca in Mexico City. Four minutes later he ran from inside his own half, through most of the England defence and round the goalkeeper Peter Shilton, for a goal voted the Goal of the Century in a FIFA poll in 2002; Argentina went on to win the tournament.
7. Which country won its fifth World Cup in 2002, beating Germany 2–0 in the final in Yokohama? Brazil. Ronaldo scored both goals, four years after being taken ill on the day of the 1998 final, and Brazil remain the only country to have played at every men's World Cup.
8. Germany beat the hosts 7–1 in the 2014 semi-final. In which city? Belo Horizonte, at the Mineirão. Germany were 5–0 up after 29 minutes, four of the goals coming in six minutes, and Miroslav Klose's goal that night was his sixteenth at World Cups, taking him past Brazil's own Ronaldo to the top of the all-time list.
Round two: the laws of the game
9. How many players does each team start with, and what is the fewest a match can continue with? Eleven, one of them the goalkeeper, and seven. If red cards or injuries leave a team with fewer than seven, the match cannot go on.
10. How long is a match, and what happens to the time lost during it? Two halves of 45 minutes, with a half-time break of no more than 15. Time lost to substitutions, injuries and time-wasting is added at the end of each half, and the number on the fourth official's board is the minimum to be played, not the exact amount.
11. Can a player be offside directly from a throw-in? No, and not from a goal kick or a corner either. Otherwise a player is in an offside position if any part of the head, body or feet is in the opponents' half and nearer their goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent; arms and hands do not count, level is onside, and the position only becomes an offence once the player gets involved in play.
12. How far from the goal line is the penalty mark? Eleven metres, or twelve yards. The penalty kick was proposed by the Irish goalkeeper William McCrum and added to the laws in 1891, to stop defenders preventing a certain goal with a deliberate foul; the spot itself arrived in 1902, and before that the kick could be taken from anywhere along a line twelve yards out.
13. To within a couple of centimetres, what is the circumference of a regulation size-five ball? Between 68 and 70 centimetres, and it must weigh between 410 and 450 grams at the start of the match. The familiar pattern of twelve black pentagons and twenty white hexagons comes from the Adidas Telstar, made for the 1970 World Cup to show up clearly on black-and-white television.
14. At which World Cup were yellow and red cards first used? Mexico 1970. The English referee Ken Aston devised them after the chaotic 1966 quarter-final between England and Argentina, in which the Argentina captain refused for minutes to leave the pitch and Jack Charlton learned from the next day's papers that he had been booked; the story goes that the idea came to Aston at a traffic light. Nobody was sent off in 1970, and the first red card at a World Cup went to Chile's Carlos Caszely in 1974.
15. Since 1992, what may a goalkeeper no longer do with a ball deliberately kicked to them by a team-mate? Pick it up; doing so gives away an indirect free kick. The back-pass rule was a response to the 1990 World Cup, which produced fewer goals per game than any World Cup before it and a great deal of time-wasting, and it changed the job: goalkeepers have had to play with their feet ever since.
16. At which World Cup was the video assistant referee used for the first time? Russia 2018. The first World Cup penalty awarded after a VAR review went to France against Australia in the group stage, and Antoine Griezmann scored it.
Round three: clubs and leagues
17. What is the oldest national football competition in the world? The FA Cup, first played in 1871–72. Wanderers beat Royal Engineers 1–0 in the first final at Kennington Oval, now better known as a cricket ground, and the goal was scored by Morton Betts, who played under the pseudonym "A. H. Chequer".
18. Which club, founded in 1857, is recognised as the oldest football club in the world still in existence? Sheffield FC. It is six years older than the Football Association itself, which was founded at the Freemasons' Tavern in London in 1863.
19. In which year did the Premier League begin, and who were its first champions? 1992, when the clubs of the old First Division broke away from the Football League. Manchester United won the first title in 1992–93, their first league championship for 26 years.
20. Which club went through the 2003–04 Premier League season without losing a match? Arsenal, with 26 wins and 12 draws. They were called the Invincibles, a name first given to Preston North End, who went unbeaten through the very first Football League season in 1888–89 and won the FA Cup that year without conceding a goal.
21. Which club won the Premier League in 2015–16 after bookmakers had offered 5,000 to 1 against it at the start of the season? Leicester City, under Claudio Ranieri, a year after they had escaped relegation in the closing weeks of the season before.
22. Which club won the first five European Cups, from 1956 to 1960? Real Madrid, still the club with the most titles in the competition. The fifth final, a 7–3 win over Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden Park in Glasgow in front of more than 120,000, is still talked about as one of the finest matches ever played: Ferenc Puskás scored four, Alfredo Di Stéfano three.
23. A derby is a match between local rivals. Which two clubs contest Glasgow's Old Firm derby? Celtic and Rangers, who first met in 1888 in Celtic's first-ever match. Where the word comes from is less settled: one theory points to the rough, mass Shrovetide football once played through the streets of Derby, the other to the Epsom Derby horse race, whose name came to stand for any big occasion.
Round four: records, oddities and a tiebreak
24. How many Bundesliga goals did Gerd Müller score? 365, in 427 matches for Bayern Munich between 1965 and 1979, and it is still the record. Bayern had not even been in the first Bundesliga season in 1963: the German FA admitted one club per city, and Munich's place went to 1860.
25. Müller's 40 goals in 1971–72 stood as the Bundesliga's single-season record for 49 years. Who broke it, and how late did he leave it? Robert Lewandowski, with 41 in 2020–21; the 41st came in the 90th minute of the last match of the season, against Augsburg.
26. Who is the only player to have won the World Cup three times? Pelé, with Brazil in 1958, 1962 and 1970. He was seventeen when he scored twice in the 1958 final against Sweden, and in 1962 an injury in the second group match kept him out of the rest of the tournament.
27. In March 1966, four months before the World Cup in England, the Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen from an exhibition in London. Who found it? A dog called Pickles, out on a walk in south London a week later, who sniffed out a package wrapped in newspaper. The trophy was back in time to be handed to Bobby Moore at Wembley that July.
28. Which country has won the Women's World Cup most often? The United States, four times, in 1991, 1999, 2015 and 2019, counting up to the 2023 tournament, which Spain won by beating England 1–0 in Sydney. Germany won it in 2003 and 2007, and in 2007 they did not concede a single goal all tournament.
29. For how long were women's matches banned from the grounds of FA member clubs in England? Fifty years, from December 1921 until 1971. A year before the ban, on Boxing Day 1920, a game between Dick, Kerr Ladies and St Helens Ladies had drawn around 53,000 people to Goodison Park.
30. Tiebreak: how many spectators does Wembley Stadium hold? 90,000, the most of any stadium in the United Kingdom; closest answer wins. If that still leaves a tie, ask for the year of the first official international, Scotland against England in Glasgow: 1872, and it finished 0–0.
Pitching it for a room of fans and non-fans
Every football quiz runs into the same problem. In any group of eight there is one person who knows the answer before you have finished the question, and two who would rather be doing something else. Pitch the quiz at the expert and the other seven stop playing by question five; pitch it at the reluctant two and the expert spends the evening shouting answers. The way through is to make different rounds hard in different ways.
The laws round is the leveller. Everyone who has watched a match has an opinion about offside, and nobody needs to remember a season from 1998 to know how many players are on the pitch. Put it second, after a World Cup round that most people can score in, and the casual fans usually keep pace with the regulars, which is the moment a mixed room starts to enjoy itself.
Spread the clubs. Ten questions about the club most of the room supports will feel like an exam to the one rival fan at the table and like a home game to everybody else. One question about the local club is a nice touch; the rest should range across countries and decades. The same goes for eras: a quiz that lives entirely in the 1990s is a quiz for people who were teenagers in the 1990s.
For the expert, make the answer harder rather than the question more obscure. Instead of a piece of trivia nobody else could answer, ask for the year as well as the team, or the score as well as the winner, and give a bonus point for it. The question still works for everyone; it simply has a ceiling. And if the expert is unbeatable anyway, hand them the questions: a host who can settle an argument about the 1966 crossbar is worth more than a fourth round.
Leave out the questions that rot. Anything that pairs "current", "this season" or "the most" with a living player is likely to be wrong by the time you read it out, and in a room full of football fans somebody will have checked their phone before you reach the answer.
Before kick-off, at half-time, or at a club night
Before a match, twenty minutes of quiz is the right length: long enough to settle the room, short enough to finish before the teams come out. Two rounds of eight, from the World Cup and laws sections above, fit well. Keep the club round for an evening when nobody's attention is on a screen.
Half-time lasts fifteen minutes at most, and people need some of it for the kitchen and the queue, so a half-time round is five questions and no more. Choose them before kick-off, keep them easy enough to answer from the sofa, and resist adding a sixth because the first five went quickly. If you have nothing prepared, the daily round on omequiz is exactly five questions, the same five for everybody that day, and takes about two minutes.
At a club night — a supporters' club, a Sunday league side's end-of-season do, a youth section raising money for kit — the room is bigger and the rivalry friendlier. Play in teams of four or five, mix the regulars with the parents and partners, and run all four rounds with a break after the second. The laws round goes down particularly well in a club where half the room coaches or referees: they will know the answers, and they will enjoy explaining them.
Every quiz needs a tiebreak, and football has good ones because so many of its numbers are fixed. Use estimation questions where the closest answer wins: the capacity of Wembley (90,000), of Borussia Dortmund's Signal Iduna Park for league matches (around 81,000, with about 25,000 standing on the south terrace), the permitted length of a pitch for an international match (between 100 and 110 metres), or the year of the first international (1872). Avoid stadiums that are being rebuilt and attendance records where every source gives a different figure.
Playing it on omequiz
To have the score keep itself, type the questions into a community quiz in the editor. Each multiple-choice question needs four options with one correct, so the real work is the three wrong ones: for "Which country hosted the first World Cup?", Brazil, Italy and Argentina make a question, while three countries nobody would pick make a giveaway. Put the tiebreaks in as estimation questions, where you set a range and the answer is scored by distance, so "How many does Wembley hold?" rewards whoever was closest.
Then open a room and send the six-character code. Everyone joins in the browser on their phone, with nothing to install, and answers against the same twenty-second clock; points come for a correct answer and for answering quickly. A room holds up to ten players, so at a bigger club night each team plays on one phone. If some of the group are watching the match somewhere else, voice and video in the room are there if you want them and the quiz works the same without.
If you would rather not write anything, the sports category already holds ready-made questions, and a room can combine it with up to two more of the nine categories. The full list of sports questions with their answers is public too, which makes it a quick place to find a replacement when one of the thirty above does not suit your group.
Try it now
Make a room in 30 seconds and send the code to your friends.