How to Play Goal Radar?

The challenge: identify the secret footballer in up to 25 attempts using the Goal Radar similarity score.

Every player you enter is compared to the hidden one across 5 criteria: Nationality, League, Club, Position and Age.

Nationality, League and Club are binary: 100% if they match, 0% if they don't.

Position gives you 100% for an exact match, 50% if they play in the same area of the pitch (e.g. both defenders), and 0% otherwise.

Age gives you 100% for the same age, dropping as the gap grows — hitting 0% at 5 years or more difference.

  • Easy Mode: The hidden player always belongs to one of the top 5 clubs from Europe's major leagues. Great if you mainly know the superstars.
  • Normal Mode: The hidden player can be from any club in Europe's top 5 leagues. For true football experts only.

A brand-new mystery player is revealed every day for each mode.

Good Luck!

🔍 Fun Facts

The origin of football radars: Radar charts (or spider charts) were popularised in football by data analytics companies like StatsBomb, letting scouts compare two players' statistical profiles at a glance.

Football's Moneyball: Clubs like Brentford (England) and FC Midtjylland (Denmark) base a large part of their signings on mathematical similarity models, prioritising data radars over traditional scouting.

Finding the next Messi: Modern scouting algorithms use 'cosine similarity' calculations to find statistically identical players, letting clubs search for exact replacements by filtering position, age, league and performance metrics.

Breaking the radar: When Pep Guardiola converted Philipp Lahm from right-back to central midfielder at Bayern Munich, his passing and recovery radar changed so drastically that the algorithms of the time classified him as two completely different players.