Insporta’s football curriculum is a ladder of knowledge levels plus a separate Laws of the Game series. The guides published in this book cover knowledge levels 4 (Intermediate) to 10 (Professional), the Laws of the Game series for Laws 1 to 17 of the IFAB 2026/27 edition, and the interesting-facts chapters. Every test is ten questions, and every question carries a reference to the Law, report or metric definition it was written from.
How the football curriculum is organised
Football on Insporta has two parts. The knowledge levels run from Beginner (level 1) to Professional (level 10) and cover how the game is played and coached: the Laws in outline, technique, tactics, systems, analytics and history. The Laws of the Game series sits beside them and takes the IFAB Laws one at a time, each with its own set of tests.
Levels 1 to 4 exist in the app. The guides here start at level 5, the first level written under the process described in How Insporta writes a test: a plan of ten sub-levels with ten tests each, a duplicate hunt against everything already live, and a fact check of the correct answer and all three wrong options against the primary source.
Level 5: Upper-Intermediate
Level 5 deepens tactical understanding beyond the fundamentals of the earlier levels. Its ten sub-levels cover pressing triggers and gegenpressing, from Michels and Sacchi to Klopp and Iraola; possession philosophies, from Total Football and tiki-taka to positional play and relationism; direct and counter-attacking football, from Reep and catenaccio to Mourinho, Simeone and Leicester, and the direct turn of 2025-26; playing out from the back, including the 2019 goal-kick change; defensive schemes and the offside trap, from the 1925 Law to semi-automated offside; attacking geometry, half-spaces and width; set-piece design and dead-ball specialists; football analytics, from expected goals to on-ball value; formations and their logic, from the 2-3-5 pyramid to the 3-2-4-1; and the tactics and modern era of the women’s game, up to Arsenal’s Champions League win in Lisbon in 2025.
Level 6: Advanced
Level 6 works at the level of tactical systems, below the survey that level 5 gave. Nine sub-levels are published: positional play (juego de posición) and its three superiorities; wide play and role inversion; striker roles, from the false nine to the target man; marking systems, zonal, man-oriented and hybrid; tactical schools and their systems, from Michels and Cruyff to Bielsa and Simeone; blocks and defensive organisation; the goalkeeper inside the system; midfield structures, pivots, the box and rest defence; and game management and in-game adjustments, including how a coach spends the five-substitution allowance. The measure each sub-level is held to is not that the topic is new but that the question is new: level 5 already touched most of these ideas in ten to seventy questions each, so level 6 asks only below that depth.
The Laws of the Game series
The Laws of the Game series takes the IFAB Laws of the Game 2026/27 one Law at a time, from Law 1 (Field of Play) to Law 17 (The Corner Kick). Each guide sets out what the Law covers, referee-facing, player-facing and administrative material alike, and the tests are written in original wording from the Law, never reproduced from it. Recent changes are taught as changes, with the date: the goalkeeper’s eight-second limit and the corner kick that replaced the six-second rule and its indirect free kick from 1 July 2025; the 2019 goal-kick, free-kick and dropped-ball rules; the five-second countdown at a delayed throw-in or goal kick.
Which sources the questions are written from
In order of priority: the IFAB Laws of the Game, current edition, for every rule; UEFA and FIFA technical reports for how elite teams actually played in a tournament; Opta and StatsBomb definitions for any metric, so that expected goals, post-shot expected goals, expected threat or on-ball value mean what their publishers say they mean; and the coaching literature for tactical ideas and goalkeeping craft, England Football Learning among others. A Law or a metric is cited by number or by publisher in the question’s source reference, never in the question itself.
The facts that were checked while writing and reviewing these tests, including the rules that changed, are listed at Football fact checks.
What is deliberately out of scope
Insporta measures sport-specific knowledge, not fitness. Football questions about barbell weights, conditioning protocols, training loads or the biomechanics of the athlete’s body fall outside what the tests measure and are removed when found. So does coaching pedagogy and motor-learning theory that would read identically for basketball: a question has to be about football. Trophy and biography recall is kept out of the tactics levels; it belongs to a history level, when that is written. And nothing is asked about “the document”: a question must be answerable from knowledge of the game, not from a text the reader does not have in front of them. Why the construct is drawn this way is set out in Sport-specific knowledge, not generic brain training.
What is planned next
The tenth sub-level of level 6, knockout and tournament tactics (two-legged ties, the abolition of the away-goals rule in UEFA competitions in 2021, extra time and shoot-out preparation, group-stage arithmetic, squad management across a run), is planned and will complete the level at 1,000 questions. Laws 1 to 3 will complete the Laws of the Game series. Levels 7 to 10 are planned only once level 6 is complete, following the rule Insporta uses for every sport: a level is planned when the one before it is written, so that the plan is informed by what the earlier levels turned out to hold rather than by a guess made months earlier.