The Ball Grid
The Hardest Premier League Grid Categories, Ranked
Every category type, ranked by how often people actually get it right.
Across every grid published so far, players have submitted 20,916 answers, of which 53.4% were correct. That average hides an enormous spread. Some squares are solved by virtually everyone who sees them; one has never been solved at all.
Here is what the data says about which categories are genuinely hard — not which ones feel hard.
Category types, hardest first
- Age at season start — 30.8% correct. The hardest category type by a distance.
- Yellow cards — 40.4%. The statistic nobody stores.
- Assists — 44.0%. Remembered far less precisely than goals.
- Goals — 49.4%. The best-remembered statistic in football, and still a coin flip.
- Height — 54.3%. Easy at the extremes, guesswork in the middle.
- Nationality — 59.2%.
- Clean sheets — 59.8%. The most forgiving, because it mostly means "name a goalkeeper at a good team".
Why age is hardest
Age categories beat people more comprehensively than anything else, and the reason is that age is a moving target.
Every other attribute is fixed. A player's nationality does not change. Their height does not change. The goals they scored in 2019/20 are permanently theirs. But "Under 23 at season start" depends on a date, and your mental model of a player's age is anchored to now rather than to the season on the board.
Worse, football has a habit of labelling players as prospects long after they stop being young. Ask which Premier League players were under 23 at the start of 2022/23 and most supporters will name several who had already turned 24 — because they still feel like the young one.
The pairing of "Under 23 at Season Start" with "5+ Yellow Cards" was answered correctly just 5.6% of the time across 354 attempts. Two categories nobody tracks, multiplied together.
Where the difficulty actually comes from
The single clearest pattern in the data is that difficulty is not a property of a category. It is a property of a combination.
"3+ Assists" on its own is moderately tricky. "5+ Yellow Cards" on its own is tricky. Put them together and the success rate collapses to 11.7% across 403 attempts — far lower than either category's individual difficulty would predict.
The reason is that the two conditions demand different kinds of player. Assists come from creative players. Cards come from combative ones. The overlap is real but narrow, and it consists almost entirely of players most fans do not think of as creative: the ball-winning midfielder who also picks a pass, the marauding full-back.
Hard squares are usually squares whose answer sits in a category your mental model treats as two separate groups.
The easiest squares
At the opposite end, some squares are nearly free:
- Defender × Tottenham — 98.4%
- Defender × Newcastle United — 97.8%
- Non-English × Liverpool — 95.1%
- European × Arsenal — 94.4%
The pattern is obvious once stated: club plus a broad attribute. Supporters hold squad lists in memory as whole units, so "a Tottenham defender" requires no computation at all — you simply read one off the list you already have.
This is also why club-based squares are the wrong place to chase points in Classic Grid. If 98% of players find the same answer, that answer is worth very little. The rare-answer bonus rewards finding the Tottenham defender nobody else remembered.
What this means for your score
Three practical conclusions fall out of the numbers.
Do the club squares first, but do not linger. They are nearly free and they are worth the least. Bank them and move on.
Translate statistical categories into player types. Nobody remembers booking counts, but everybody knows who fouls. Nobody remembers assist totals, but everybody knows who creates. The translation is where the points are.
When two categories seem contradictory, that is the signal. Creative and combative, tall and quick, young and experienced — the squares that feel impossible are usually the ones where a genuinely unusual player exists. Those are the highest-scoring answers on the board.
Figures drawn from 20,916 recorded answers on The Ball Grid, covering every grid published to date. Play today's grid.