Where do the questions come from? Derby Duel's data rules
Derby Duel · September 29, 2026
Every question, every option and every correct answer you see in Derby Duel comes from a database record. No question is written by hand and no value is estimated. This post explains how questions are built and why some names show up often and others rarely.
Underneath there are more than half a million footballers and around nineteen thousand clubs. For each player we keep clubs, nationality, position, age, market value and career statistics. If a fact is missing from the source, it stays empty, and an empty fact never makes it into a question. So if a player's age is unknown, he will never appear in a question about age. The data is refreshed every day, so transfers and new-season numbers make their way into the game.
The decoys are as real as the right answer. The two numbers in Over Under, the six clubs in Shared Badge, the claims in True or False: all read from the same database. A wrong option is not a made-up number, it is another player's real value.
Some games guarantee that a solution exists. In XOX the criteria are chosen so that real footballers fit every square of the grid; an unsolvable square is never built. In How Many every hand has at least one player who fits all the cards, and he is shown at the end of the hand.
Fame decides which names appear. Every footballer has a place in an order of how well known he is, and your rating decides how deep into that order the game goes. At a low rating you get stars everybody knows; as your rating rises the pool widens and less famous names come in. Difficulty does not come only from names: in Over Under the two numbers get closer together as ratings rise.
The game also knows you a little. Players from your country get a slightly larger share of the pool; it is a share, not a gate, so names from other countries do not disappear.
To avoid repetition, the names you have seen are remembered. A player who came up recently drops out of the pool and the next name takes his place. The memory is limited, so a name can come back after a while, but you will not see the same faces over and over.
If you think you have found a mistake in a question, write to us from the feedback page. Every fix in the data reaches everyone's game with the next refresh.