Two Reading FC fans took the Twitter world by storm today after releasing a football-themed quiz based on the popular Wordle.

Wordle is an online quiz in which users get six attempts to guess a hidden word with clues which went viral in autumn 2021.

From just 90 users per day in November 2021 to over two million people playing Wordle daily in mid-January, it was brought by the New York Times Company later in the month and is now on the New York Times website.

Dave Stevens and Alex Everson, both key members of the popular fan channel Elm Park Royals, were fans of the online phenomenon but had decided that there was room for a niche.

They have brought to the world DING-le, the Reading FC Wordle game.

 

Mr Stevens, a web programmer who lives in Denver, Colorado in the United States, said: “We have been doing Wordle for the past few weeks and a few football related ones, but we’ve been chatting about how it’s cool but we don’t talk about the top five leagues or top players, we talk about Reading so wouldn’t it be cool if there was a Reading version.

“We looked into it, and my career is a programmer for websites, so I looked at it and it didn’t look that difficult, so we looked to put it together and it didn’t take that long. We started it Monday last week, just in the evenings after work, and finished it off last night.”

Being six hours behind the UK, Mr Stevens put the tweet out before going to bed and woke up gobsmacked at the impact it has made in such a short space of time, even being retweeted by the official Reading FC twitter account.

He exclaimed: “I’m very surprised. We’re six hours behind here [in Denver, USA] and I tweeted to say we’d finished it just before I went to bed and expected to wake up to maybe three likes then I find that the official club account has retweeted it and away we go.

“We’ve had four supporters of other clubs ask for it, Sheffield Utd, Tottenham, Leyton Orient and I’m currently working on Blackpool.”

With more than 150 years of history at the Royals, it was impossible to pick every player, but more than 250 have currently been uploaded onto the game, with players having made their debut under Alan Pardew the general cut-off point, although there are one or two exceptions.

Mr Stevens added: “Right now we have 250 players, and we want one a day so we shake it all up.

Reading Chronicle:

Above: Ady Williams with James Harper and Jamie Cureton (credit: PA)

 

"We don’t know who they are either as we want to play too.

“For the next 250 days we don’t have to touch it, it just works.

“We’re about to push a new update in the next few hours as Ady Williams has expressed a disappointment at not being included.

“We want to keep the game fun and give people a chance, so we chose Alan Pardew debuts onwards up to the present day. A couple were missed out just because of the way we complied the date.

“That was the arbitrary cut off, but Nicky Forster was one of my favourite players of all time, so I had to include him too!”