Inside the UK-wide football trivia quiz boom

“It started out as a short-term way of enticing people to come to the pub,” says Jack Ellis. “But after we saw how much people were enjoying them, we got to a point where we now organise quizzes at five different venues across London.”

In the past few years, as the organiser of retro football quizzes in various pubs, Ellis has seen first hand the steady surge in popularity of the nostalgic football quiz.

Full disclosure – I am one of these people. I never knew that reaching into the depths of my memory for nuggets of football trivia – say, the season Ipswich Town followed their foray into Europe with relegation from the Premier League (2001-02), or the five strikers in Premier League history to have scored hat-tricks for three different clubs (Teddy Sheringham, Nicolas Anelka, Kevin Campbell, Les Ferdinand and Yakubu, of course) – was something that I needed in my life. Until I discovered football trivia quizzes.

For a sport that is overwhelmed with wall-to-wall coverage and an endless conveyor belt of content, it is heartening that there is still space to gather and quarrel about obscure football minutiae. With the surge in popularity of online Zoom quizzes in the pandemic, and different football podcasts deploying distinctive formats, live football quizzes have tapped into something unique and created a growing subculture.

For the uninitiated, the events follow a similar pattern – once you have managed to exonerate yourself sheepishly from all other social activities, you enter the vicariously designed decor of a football-themed bar, a safe space for football ­fanatics, and everything changes. Football shirts not only dominate the surroundings, there’s also an unspoken rule that quizzers donning retro tops are awarded credibility, where the more niche the top, the greater the respect.

In the heat of quiz battle, providing rationale for an answer is often accompanied by proclamations such as: “It’s a red herring – Phil Neville was in the Panini sticker album, but he never made the final squad at France 98”, or “Trust me, Steve Bruce managed all of the yo-yo clubs, but he never managed Middlesbrough”. Then there are players whose careers will for ever be remembered in the pantheon of football trivia for their individual feats, none more so than Robbie Earnshaw, famed for scoring a hat-trick in all four divisions of the English Football League. Or those journeymen with such a diverse and illustrious career trajectory they have been rewarded with the status of default answers – when we’re struggling for ideas in my team, someone will suggest: “We might as well go with Anelka, lads.”

What often ties this together is how it brings you back to a time that you feel a fondness towards. It’s not uncommon to attach yourself to football memorabilia – your first-ever match-day ticket, a club scarf or shirt, partly as it might represent a unique way of bonding with a family member or loved one. In a similar vein, bringing yourself back to the remote memory of a player you didn’t know that you cared about, who had an ancillary role alongside the players who shaped your love for the game, can be a way of reconnecting you to simpler, more innocent times.

Ellis’s quizzes have become enormously popular. He established a partnership with the whisky brand Jameson for his Retro Football Quiz events, and the highest number of teams at a single quiz stands at 38.

Other football trivia quizzes include those run by Career We Go, which take place across London, Glasgow and Manchester, quizzes at Feed the Yak in London, and the Channel 4 Football Italia-inspired Golaccio bar, which is now in Huddersfield. The secret ingredient to all of these is nostalgia.

“Back in the day, there was an unbelievable amount of cult heroes who I include in the questions,” Ellis said. “We sometimes give out oranges during the break of the quizzes, although that joke gets lost on a few of the younger quizzers.”

It would be mindboggling if the total number of accumulated hours spent on Football Manager or Sporcle, the quizzing website, by participants at a trivia quiz was ever calculated, yet it’s precisely that dedication to information that will almost certainly never prove useful anywhere else that fosters a genuine sense of community at these events.

The sheer delight someone feels when they get the answer right on a hotly disputed question, seemingly justifying all of those hours, is something to behold.

I once spotted Mauricio Taricco, Tottenham’s Argentinian full-back from the early 2000s, from a grainy photo during a picture round, much to the astonishment of a long-time Spurs season-ticket holder in our team. I would never profess to having any specific memories about Taricco as a player, but collecting his sticker for the 2002-03 Merlin sticker album has etched him deep into my consciousness.

In a world where football increasingly caters to the interests of corporations and drifts further away from the communities that it once served, football trivia quizzes provide a sense of community.

And maybe the real prize isn’t the bar tab given to the winning team, it’s being able to enter what feels like a time warp for a couple of hours, surrounded by people who care far too much about the same obscure details that stopped mattering years ago, and lust over a version of football that you didn’t realise you missed.

Fancy your chances? Here are five of my favourite quiz questions (answers below)

1. Which player made his England debut in 1995, signed for Middlesbrough for a then club-record fee of £5.2m in 1996, and made his last England appearance against Greece in 2001?

2. In August 2006, an elbow from a Manchester City player went down as one of the worst fouls in Premier League history, but for three points, can you name the two players involved and the colour of the card given?

3. Which former Premier League player celebrated some of his goals by putting a dummy in his mouth?

4. Which player’s name makes a spoof film title involving Robert De Niro boxing and a midfielder who played for Hull, Wigan and Fulham?

5. Which two players scored for Argentina against England at the World Cup finals in France in 1998?

Answers

1. Nick Barmby

2. Ben Thatcher, Pedro Mendes, yellow

3. Carlos Tevez

4. Raging Bullard

5. Gabriel Batistuta and Javier Zanetti