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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Halftime Scoreboard Quiz

Yeah. There's a bit of a lot of soccer content you can be expecting around here. Today, while I try and figure out how I can get MS Word to let me have a 10.25-size font (it's only letting me do full-point and half-point fonts, not quarter-point as I want), enjoy the following soccer-themed Sporcle quizzes, along with my scores.

ROUND 1: Name the countries that won the World Cup. No, no, that's too easy. Name them and also the winners of the six continental national-team competitions. Your time limit is 8 minutes. (My score: 107/108, missing only the champion of the 1970 African Cup of Nations.)
ROUND 2: You're given the top ten ranked domestic leagues in Europe: England, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Russia, Portugal, the Netherlands, Ukraine and Belgium. Your task here is to name the ten countries that provided the most foreign-based players in each of the leagues. (My score: 90/100. I had the toughest time with the Portuguese league, missing three countries there.)
ROUND 3: Through April 12, 2013, there have been 255 players who have earned at least 100 caps- that is, appearances for their national team. I didn't do so hot here, but the at-first-glance humiliating score of 33/255 is misleading. In fact, that's in the 90th percentile. A lot of really famous names never made that 100-appearance threshold because national teams simply play more often than they used to. In addition, a lot of the names are for some national teams that don't get paid attention to and come from leagues that don't get widely followed. For example, six of the names come from the United Arab Emirates. Six more are from Latvia. There were some names I ought to have gotten, granted, but a lot of them you could have given me a million years and I wouldn't come up with them. In fact, only five names out of the entire list have been correctly identified by over half the people who've played. The all-time cap leader has been named only 10.8% of the time. Nobody has cracked 183, let alone gotten a perfect score.

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