Football Bingo: Can This Unlikely Pairing Make a Beautiful Game?

Author: Paul Aitken
Published: 05/02/2025
Last Modified: 05/02/2025

Although not everyone will agree with me, football and bingo sound like the perfect combination! 

Football Bingo is a game that combines the world’s most popular sport with one of the longest-running numbers games, creating something that will appeal to sports fans as well as bingo lovers.

What is Football Bingo?

There is no strict definition of football bingo, as the name is free to use by anyone who throws together a bingo game and adds a few sporty elements. Googling the term in the United States will also give you different results, as they play their football with their hands and they like to wear helmets while doing it.

No disrespect—I love American football, but I’m British, so I have an inbuilt intolerance of “American football” and often turn into my father and complain that it’s “just rugby with padding” every time it’s mentioned.

How Football Bingo is Played

The most common form of football bingo being played right now uses bingo cards of between 12 and 16 squares. All of these squares feature elements plucked from a football team, including pictures of players and managers, as well as club crests. It’s like a Panini sticker book, only it’s a bingo card, so there are absolutely no “swapsies”.

Instead of trying to match up numbers on your card, you just need to match relevant players and other football imagery.

It’s not quite that simple, though, and there is a knowledge element that makes it more interesting.

What Makes Football Bingo Fun?

To understand how football bingo works, let’s consider an example.

Sandro Tonali’s name is called out. You look down at your card and see that you don’t have the tenacious Italian midfielder. However, you do have the Newcastle United club badge, the Premier League logo, and the Italian national team squares.

Tonali plays for Newcastle United in the Premier League, and he has also played for the Italian national team. You can mark off any of these squares. It’s your choice, but you need to be a little strategic with it and consider which square is most likely to appear again.

If you have a World Cup trophy and La Liga, for instance, you may be better off making the World Cup square for someone like Julian Alvarez. Yes, he plays in La Liga, but he has also won the World Cup, and you’re more likely to encounter another La Liga player than you are another World Cup winner.

Of course, it depends on how deep the game goes, how many leagues it includes, and how many players are in the tombola, but that’s the general idea.

This tactical element adds an extra level of skill to the game and means you need to know the game and think smartly.

The Wild Card Revelation

Some variations of Football Bingo use a Wild Card, which adds a little more excitement to the game.

You can use the Wild Card once per game. It lets you play multiple squares at once. So, in the Tonali example, you don’t need to think about whether to use him for Newcastle United, the Premier League, or Italy and you can use him for all three.

It’s a power move, but as with everything else in this game, it’s something you need to think about. It could be the difference maker, but if you use it at the wrong time, you’ll waste it and may struggle to get the best possible result.

Play Football Bingo

The variation of Football Bingo discussed here is played for fun, and has become popular in online football communities. It’s not a big money game just yet, but if its popularity continues to rise, that could change in the future.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that we’ll see a game like this appear on the biggest bingo sites, as they focus more on chance-based gameplay to accommodate all players. So, if we do see it in the near future, it will likely be in a very different form.