POACH is a free daily football puzzle. Every day you are handed a real Premier League side from football history and asked to do one thing: win the league. The game is how you do it. You do not buy players or build a fantasy team. You rob them, one team at a time.
The idea
Most team-builders let you assemble a dream XI from anyone you fancy. POACH does the opposite. You start as a genuine bottom-half club and climb the league by beating the sides above you one by one. The only way to get stronger is to steal from the teams on the way. Before each match you look at your opponent's real formation, with every name turned face down, and pick a position to raid. Their best player in that role is revealed. If he is an upgrade he signs for you on the spot and, better still, he is missing from their team for the match you are about to play.
That blind steal is the whole game, and it is all about your ball knowledge. Raid a position you are weak in and you might just nick a result. Get greedy and you will likely get found out. Win and you climb a place. Lose or draw and the run is over and you start again from the bottom.
The same puzzle for everyone
Here is the part that makes it a proper daily. Everybody in the world gets the exact same table, the same starting club and the same rivals, every day, refreshing at midnight. There is no luck in the matches. The same choices always produce the same result, so when you compare your run against a friend's, you are comparing two sets of decisions and nothing else. It is a puzzle.
Built on real history, rated by us
The clubs and players are real, drawn from actual seasons. The player ratings, though, are entirely our own. We build them from public, factual squad information using POACH's own model. Nothing is lifted from any video game. You can read more about that on the how we rate players page.
Who makes it
POACH is made and run by JCR Web Solutions. It is free to play and there is nothing to sign up for. If you want the rules in full, head to how to play, or just dive in and learn by losing.
Play POACH