Who Are Ya? is like Wordle but with football players

I have enjoyed seeing Wordle fans make a million new daily puzzle games to make us guess words in strange and cruel new ways. I have enjoyed even more seeing Wordle fans make daily puzzle games which aren’t about guessing words, using familiar elements for whole new challenges. Heardle makes you guess songs by listening to their opening seconds. And now I’ve learned about Who Are Ya?, a game which uses the Wordle format to make you guess the identify of footballers. It’s an interesting challenge.

You can play Who Are Ya? over here in your browser for free.

Each day, you have eight guesses to figure out the identity of a mystery football player. They’ve played in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1, or Bundesliga in the past season. And you start out with an extremely blurry and discoloured photo. So, guess away.

Unlike in Wordle, you’re not guessing from spelling. Start typing a name and it’ll let you select your guess’s name from a list. Your hints then come from it comparing five attributes against the correct answer: their nationality, the league they play in, the club they play for, their position on the pitch, and their age. A green box means you were right about that, grey means guess again. From there, feel your way towards the answer by guessing other players on the same team, or in the same position, or whatever way you can. Their photo gets a little clearer with each guess too.

Our Graham boasts that he got today’s in two guesses. Yeah yeah, alright.

My knowledge of football these days come from keeping an idle eye on Hibs and listening to Bob Mortimer and Andy Dawson’s Athletico Mince podcast, so yeah, this is not for me. Still, I got close today by guessing names from the Gangs of the EPL. I feel I’d do a lot better if it were limited to players in the 1994 Merlin Premier League sticker album.

Also, Who Are Ya? is a great name. Very glad to hear that and not e.g. Kickle, Footle, or Ronaldle. Actually, no, I quite like Ronaldle.