If you’re like me and you’ve been listening to Lee Dixon’s commentary of World Cup 2026, you might be thinking “I could do a better job than that”. In that case, Do You Really Know About Soccer? might be for you. It’s a quiz game focused on the glorious game, and it’s a chance to brush up on your football knowledge before taking his seat pitch-side.
First up, Do You Really Know About Soccer? is NOT multiplayer. This isn’t a chance to unleash your inner Statto against your mates. This is purely a solo experience with a single game mode, where you answer increasingly difficult questions as you climb a tower. Why a tower? Presumably you kicked your ball up there and you want it back.
The Other Side Just Hasn’t Turned up, Jeff
Including no multiplayer mode is a bit rubbish, of course. There’s something slightly pointless about reeling out football trivia on your own. You can play as a team, of course, but there’s no denying that the lack of competitive game modes lessens the experience. I want to wow my mates with my knowledge of stadium names, thank you very much.
What is included is four rounds with five questions in each. Get a single question wrong and it’s Game Over. You need to get all twenty questions correct in a row to reach Do You Really Know About Soccer?’s end screen. There are no question categories to work through; no highscore tables; no endless runs through the game’s entire question bank.
As a quiz format, it’s far from the best. I deeply disliked that a single wrong answer would boot you back to the start. It puts a lot of onus on the questions being watertight (spoiler: they aren’t), and there needs to be a large-enough pool of questions to ensure that starting all over again doesn’t feel repetitious (spoiler: there isn’t). The format works for games like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? because the stakes are so high, but in a low-budget quiz game, it feels deflating.
Lifelines Gives the Quiz a Lifeline
The questions are all multiple choice, with four options per question. There are also some lifelines, or power-ups, that can be bought to help you along. You can spend an accrued currency to re-roll questions or remove options, giving you a greater chance of maintaining your winning streak. It’s slightly surprising just how much currency you get: you can use a lifeline on pretty much every round and still have cash to spare. I found it a little too generous: I didn’t want a helping hand all the time.
A quiz game lives or dies on the quality of its questions, though, and that quality is spotty in Do You Really Know About Soccer?. First of all, you better expect a European and South American emphasis: there are virtually no questions on Asian or African football, for example. That’s perhaps unsurprising, but a noticeable pair of blinkers.
Questions in the opening rounds are farcical in how easy they are (“what shape is a football?”, “What part of the body do you play football with?”), but I quite liked that. I could kick back and imagine the kind of person who gets them wrong.
In the following rounds, the questions get pretty tough. You need to be well-versed in your Champions’ League and World Cup winners, as well as the scorers of the goals in each final. There are a surprising number of questions about South American leagues, which is something that I definitely need to brush up on. Where did Ronaldinho start his footballing career, for example? That was my first time being chucked out of the tower in Do You Really Know About Soccer?. (The answer is Grêmio, by the way.)
Wording that Drives you Kaka
Play for long enough, though, and you start to notice some cracks. I’m not convinced by some of the questions, or – at least – their wording. Which team ‘developed’ Haaland, for example? The multiple choice lists every club that he’s played for. Perhaps I overthought it, but I went for Borussia Dortmund, as that was where he really kicked on, but the answer was Molde FK. It makes sense in hindsight, but did the question need to be worded in such a way that the answer was debatable? Why not just ‘first club’?
Which defensive midfielder won the Ballon d’Or? My head immediately went to Lothar Matthäus or Rodri, but the answer was Luca Modric. A CDM? Modric? I started getting my “well actually”s ready, but there was no one to complain to. “Which nation is considered the home of football?”: England is one of the options, but the answer is actually Brazil.
I’m being a little critical, as the answers are generally on point. But with a one-mistake-and-you’re-out policy, a muddled question can get frustrating. You’re back to the start, armed with the answers to a few more questions. Which, as it turns out, is a useful thing to have as the questions repeat.
They’re Trying to Walk it in
And boy do they repeat. I’ve played Do You Really Know About Soccer? to completion four times now, and about three-quarters of the questions are familiar to me now. There can’t be more than 100 questions here in total, which – and I know this is a budget release – is way too low for me. I don’t want to be seeing repeated questions on a second run.
The best thing I can say about Do You Really Know About Soccer? is that it’s well timed. I was well up for a football trivia game, and it arrives during the World Cup group matches. But everything else is so lacklustre, as if it was an opportunistic rushed release rather than something thought out.
With some multiplayer, more modes, about ten times the number of questions and an editor to check the wording, Do You Really Know About Soccer? might have passed muster. But as Lee Dixon would probably say, they’ve just not turned up today.
A football quiz game released during the World Cup is an open goal, but Do You Really Know About Soccer? has only gone and missed it.
Important Links
The World Cup Is On – But Do You Really Know About Soccer? – https://www.thexboxhub.com/the-world-cup-is-on-but-do-you-really-know-about-soccer/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/do-you-really-know-about-soccer-xbox-series/9ph8nx0gtxvd
Buy an Xbox One edition – https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/do-you-really-know-about-soccer-xbox-one/9p9htbh878lh
Buy a Windows PC version – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/do-you-really-know-about-soccer-windows/9p4kv5rlx5tf
