Behind the game
How It Works
Where the records come from, why coverage varies, and why the numbers stay hidden.
Play Your Club Right runs on real career records. This page explains, in broad terms, where they come from and what that means for the game you're playing.
Where the data comes from
Career records — appearances, goals and the other statistics the game uses — are compiled from publicly available sources and checked against one another before anything goes into a game.
Each sport has its own established public record, and the game draws on those rather than on anything proprietary. The specifics of how it's assembled aren't published, for the same reason the numbers themselves aren't.
What this means for accuracy
The data is good enough to make a fair game, and not good enough to cite. Some clubs have deeper and cleaner records than others, which generally tracks how well documented the club is rather than how big it is.
Where a player's record is incomplete, or their years at the club can't be established with any confidence, they're left out rather than guessed at. That's why some clubs have a shallower pool than their history suggests — the alternative is serving you a question with a wrong answer, which is worse.
If something looks wrong, tell me. Corrections get made.
Why the numbers aren't published
The obvious question about a site sitting on this much data is why none of it appears as tables.
Because the numbers are the answers. A page listing a club's all-time appearance record next to a game asking you to guess it isn't a game any more. The data stays behind the game deliberately.
How the game is built
The games are static and load fast, and the whole thing is built to work on a phone with one bar of signal — that was the main design constraint throughout.
The app is the same game, packaged so that everything it needs is already on your device. It works with no connection at all, and the only time it contacts a server is to read or write a leaderboard score. There's no advertising in the app.
Why some clubs are missing
Every club in the game had its records compiled and checked individually. That's a per-club job rather than a bulk import, which is why coverage is uneven and why the request a club queue moves at the pace it does.
Requests genuinely do drive what gets built next. If your club isn't here, asking is the fastest way to change that.
Who makes it
Play Your Club Right is built and run by one person, Andrew, an Oxford fan There's no team and no company behind it.