Thursday 16 June 2016

Special Edition: Introducing MatchWords!

Inspired by Euro 2016, I was looking for fun quizzing gems hiding in international football (but don't worry, actual football knowledge isn't especially required). Many fans are familiar with the 'fun fact' that when Sweden host Denmark the scoreboard reads SWE vs. DEN, spelling out SWEDEN. This got me thinking about other international fixtures which, when you merge the teams' FIFA three-letter abbreviations, spell out words.

Depending on which dictionary you use, this leads to 70-80 fixtures where the home team's abbreviation followed by the away team's abbreviation spells out a word. Most of these are really weird things that no-one ever uses (Sweden vs. Venezuela leads to 'SWEVEN', which is apparently an archaic term for a vision or dream), but some are words I've actually heard of. I've decided to call these things 'MatchWords', and - obviously - have come up with a quiz based on them.

The quiz consists of 10 such matches with clues to the home team, away team, and the MatchWord itself. There's an example of one of the questions below, and for the full thing either click here for an image, or here for a downloadable PDF! Your challenge is to identify each country, work out its three-letter abbreviation, and the resulting word. (Alternatively, you could work out the word and try and reverse-engineer the countries.) However you do it, you get 1 point per country (full name, not just its abbreviation) and 1 per word, giving a maximum possible score of 30. Answers are below the image, and as always there's a poll below to let everyone know how you did!

Click here for the full quiz!

The answers


How did you do? Let the world know with the poll! (And, if you enjoyed it, come back next week for 10 more new MatchWords!)

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