The data

Where it comes from

Every player, club, career and statistic in Know Ball? is derived from two open sources and nothing else. No scraped datasets, no commercial feeds.

• Wikidata — players, clubs, national teams, career spells and dates. Published under CC0 1.0 (public domain). wikidata.org
• English Wikipedia — career tables, squad lists, statistical lists and the article popularity used to rank how well known a player is. Published under CC BY-SA 4.0. en.wikipedia.org

Content derived from Wikipedia is used under CC BY-SA 4.0 and remains available under those terms. Individual puzzles cite the article and revision they were built from.

What that means for the games

Open data is broad and uneven. A famous career is recorded in detail; a fourth-tier loan spell in 2009 may not be recorded at all. Where a fact cannot be established from these sources it is left out rather than guessed — which is why a player you remember is occasionally missing rather than wrong.

If a guess of yours was refused and you are sure it was right, it is worth telling us — the address below reaches a person. Refused answers are logged either way, and a name that keeps being refused is how a gap in the data gets found.