Top 10
Guess the top ten by a chosen stat.
Top 10 hands you a ranked list with the names hidden: the ten players who top a chosen stat — goals, assists, appearances, clean sheets — for a competition and era you pick. Your job is simply to fill the board. Premier League all-time top scorers, La Liga assists since 2010, Champions League appearances: every config is a fresh list.
Wrong guesses cost nothing, which changes how the game feels — you're free to think out loud, chuck in the half-remembered names, and work the list from both ends. The players you'd bet your house on go in first; the last two or three rows are where reputations are made. If a row won't come, you can spend a hint on a clue for it — nationality, position, their clubs — and still get the satisfaction of typing the name yourself.
It's the purest pub-argument format we have, which is why it leads the app: everyone understands a top-ten list, and everyone is wrong about at least one row of it.
How to play
- Name the players at the top of the chosen stat — the list is ranked highest first.
- Wrong guesses are free; there are no lives. Tap a locked row to spend a hint on a clue.
- Find them all, or give up to reveal the rest.
From the coachNo lives here — a wrong shout costs you nowt. Stuck on one? Tap its row to buy a clue.
Free to play in your browser — no download, no sign-up — and every round is built from real player and season data. More about the app and the dataset.
Where to start
If you have never played, set it to a competition you actually watch and the most familiar stat on the list — all-time top scorers in your own league is the friendliest board in the app. The top few rows come free, which gets you moving, and all of the difficulty is stacked in the tail where it belongs. Narrow eras and unusual stats are where this game gets genuinely hard, and they are much more enjoyable once you have seen a full board fall.
Expect the first round to stall around the seventh or eighth row. That is normal and it is the point: give up to reveal the rest, read the names you did not have, and you will find that most of them are people you know perfectly well and would simply never have thought of. Two or three rounds of that and the shape of these lists starts to become obvious.
How to get better at Top 10
The opening rows of a Top 10 board are a formality — on any all-time scoring list you will have three or four names down before you have finished reading the stat. The round is decided in the tail, and the tail runs on a different logic. Rows seven to ten are rarely occupied by the best players of the era; they are occupied by the ones who were merely very good for a very long time. Once you stop asking who was brilliant and start asking who was available, week after week, for a decade, the missing names start arriving.
Use the config as a thinking tool rather than a difficulty dial. A competition and an era together define a window, and the useful question is who was playing continuously inside that window — not who is famous from it. A striker who arrived for the last two seasons of your era will lose out to a steady contributor who was there for all ten of them, and that mismatch between fame and tenure is where most of the hard rows live.
Spend hints on a row, not on the round. A clue is worth most where your knowledge runs out entirely — a nationality or a set of clubs on the row you have no candidate for at all. It is worth almost nothing on a row you would have reached in another thirty seconds. Because wrong guesses cost you nothing, the only real resource in this game is your patience, so aim the hints at the place where patience alone will not finish the job.
Where rounds get lost
- The decade-long professional — Appearance and assist boards are full of players who were never the best in the league and never close to it, but who started thirty games a season for eleven straight years. They are almost impossible to think of by reputation and trivially easy to recognise once named.
- The mid-table set-piece taker — Assists accumulate wherever the corners and free-kicks go, which is not necessarily at the successful clubs. A dead-ball specialist at a side that finished eleventh every year can out-assist players you would name first without hesitation.
- Recency bias — A forward who retired ten years ago still sits above the current one you are certain of. Boards are ranked on the whole of the era you selected, not on the last few seasons of it, and the mental list most of us carry is heavily weighted toward players we watched most recently.
Common questions
- Do wrong guesses cost anything in Top 10?
- No. Guessing is free, so you can think out loud and throw in the half-remembered names without protecting a score. Hints are there for a row that refuses to come, and either way you still type the answer yourself.
- Which stat and competition should I start with?
- Pick the one you'd argue about in a pub. All-time top scorers in a league you follow is the friendliest opening board, because the top few rows come free and the difficulty is all in the tail. Narrower eras and rarer stats get hard fast.
- What's the best way to finish the last few rows?
- Stop listing the greats and start thinking about longevity. The rows people miss are usually someone who was never the best player in the league but played in it for a decade — appearances and assists reward staying power more than brilliance.
- Does a hint fill the answer in for me?
- No. A hint buys you a clue about that row — a nationality, a position, the clubs — and you still type the name yourself. You keep the satisfaction of getting there; you just get a shove in the right direction.
It’s you if you've ever said "go on then, name the top scorers" and meant it as a challenge.