CLUE XIThe short versionImporting a row is only the beginning. A player becomes quiz-ready after identity matching, career ordering, scope checks and quality review.
Identity comes first
Football data contains accents, nicknames, transliterations and duplicate names. Before any statistics can be trusted, records from different sources must point to the same person. Clue XI stores a canonical player identity and separate aliases used for search and matching.
This prevents a short name and a full name from becoming two players. It also lets the answer box accept a familiar surname or spelling variation without weakening the underlying record.
Career spells need order and scope
Each senior spell is tied to a club, years, competition context, appearances and goals. The order must survive loans, returns and same-year transfers. Youth and reserve records are excluded from the main trail unless they represent senior league football.
The current Clue XI pool focuses on men's footballers connected to the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A or Ligue 1 from 1980 onwards. Club mode requires at least twenty appearances for the chosen club; league mode requires at least one hundred in the chosen league.
Quality checks create quiz readiness
A record can be technically complete and still make a poor question. Missing loans, impossible dates, a wrong badge or an ambiguous nationality will damage the deduction. Automated checks flag gaps and duplicates, while reports from players feed a correction queue.
Recognition scoring then decides where the player belongs. Casual uses scores of 65–100, Football Fan 40–64, Expert 11–39 and Challenger 0–10. None of those levels draws from every recognition range. Daily XI uses a stricter recognisable subset.
Transparent limits matter
No football database is final. Active careers change, historical sources disagree and league boundaries can be interpreted differently. Clue XI labels its statistical scope, records source information where available and provides a bug-report route for corrections.
The aim is not to claim a perfect universal football record. It is to maintain a consistent, explainable dataset for a specific deduction game—and to improve it when better evidence appears.
About this guide
Published by Clue XI, a Tazz Studio Limited product. Our explanations and practice exercises are separate from the imported player catalogue. Where a worked example uses historical records, its source is linked beside it. Sources can use different statistical definitions; if you spot a factual problem, send us a correction or email support@cluexi.co.uk.