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Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal were the most frequent Premier League team strings in a UK-oriented analysis of breached passwords. But any club name, player, shirt number or football year is a poor password ingredient: those clues are public and easy to guess. The figures below come from different datasets, so they are not a single worldwide ranking.
Which football team names appear most often in breached passwords?
The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) published a table in 2019 based on its analysis of the 100,000 most commonly breached passwords. These are counts of appearances for particular strings in that dataset, not a current measure of how many people use each club name or a ranking of passwords worldwide.
| Team string | Appearances in NCSC 2019 table |
|---|---|
| Liverpool | 280,723 |
| Chelsea | 216,677 |
| Arsenal | 179,095 |
| Man Utd | 59,440 |
| Everton | 46,619 |
| Wolves | 35,256 |
| Newcastle | 32,143 |
| Tottenham | 19,596 |
| West Ham | 18,801 |
| Brighton | 15,523 |
| Man City | 13,796 |
| Palace | 13,796 |
| Cardiff | 12,594 |
| Leicester | 7,921 |
| Fulham | 5,984 |
| Watford | 5,563 |
| Southampton | 3,691 |
| Burnley | 3,494 |
| Bournemouth | Not in top 100,000 |
| Huddersfield | Not in top 100,000 |
The NCSC’s 2019 password analysis is UK-oriented and limited to its top-100,000 breached-password list. “Not in the top 100,000” does not mean a club name is safe; it only describes its place in that dataset.
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Why do other football-password lists look different?
“Common” depends on what was counted, where the data came from and which football competition it covers. Breached-password frequency and survey answers measure different things.
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- US college football: Security Magazine’s 2021 report on Specops analysis of more than 800 million compromised passwords said Georgia Tech (GT), the University of Kansas (KU) and the University of Florida (UF) each appeared more than 5 million times. Across college football, team names and mascots appeared more than 77 million times. Reported mascot or nickname terms included Utah Utes, Florida Gators, New Mexico Lobos, Florida State Seminoles, Akron Zips, UCLA Bruins, Oklahoma State Pokes, Oklahoma Sooners, Texas Longhorns and Wisconsin Badgers. Security Magazine’s account of the 2021 analysis concerns US college football, not a global club ranking.
- Football words and player names: Specops’ 2023 Weak Password Report found “Soccer” more than 140,000 times, “Football” second among related terms, and Wembley more than 1,600 times. Its player-name ranking included Lato, Carlos, Kane, Didi, Villa, Henry, Hagi, Milla, Xavi, Rossi, Pele, Santos, Moore, Messi and Ronaldo. The report warns that common words cannot always be attributed to a player; rarer surnames are more likely to have been intentional references. Read the Specops 2023 Weak Password Report.
- Fans’ reported behavior: An ExpressVPN survey of 6,000 fans in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Australia found that nearly one in four respondents had put football-related information in a password. The survey counted favourite teams, club abbreviations, player names or nicknames, shirt numbers, football-related years, tournaments and stadiums. These are respondents’ reports, not counts from a breached-password list.
In that survey, 13.2% of UK fans and 11.3% of US fans said they used a favourite team name. Across all six countries, about seven in ten said they reused the same password or a close variation somewhere. Among respondents who had used football information in a password, 56.8% said someone who knew their football interests could guess one of their passwords. These percentages describe survey responses, not verified account compromises or a measure of how easily every password can be cracked.
Is a club name with a number or year secure?
No. A password such as “Liverpool23!” still contains a public, predictable clue. Adding a shirt number, a season, a birth year, punctuation or a club abbreviation does not make a fandom-based password reliably unpredictable. Attackers can try familiar combinations of teams, players, dates and symbols.
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The risk is greater when a password is reused. If one site is breached, criminals may try the exposed password or close variations on other accounts. As NCSC Technical Director Dr Ian Levy put it: “Password re-use is a major risk that can be avoided – nobody should protect sensitive data with something that can be guessed, like their first name, local football team or favourite band.”
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How to protect accounts without relying on football clues
- Use a unique, randomly generated password for every account. A password manager can create and store passwords so you do not have to memorize each one. Do not build them from your club, player, shirt number or football-related year.
- Turn on multifactor authentication (MFA). Use it on important accounts wherever it is offered; it adds a separate sign-in check beyond the password.
- Choose a passkey where available. Passkeys provide a sign-in alternative to a password and can reduce reliance on passwords that people choose or reuse.
- Replace reused passwords. Start with email, financial and other important accounts, then update any other account that shares the password or a close variation.
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