Levels and sub-levels: how a sport is laid out

Every sport on Insporta uses the same ladder of ten levels, from Beginner to Professional. A level is split into sub-levels, each a named topic holding several tests of ten questions, and a sport only fills as many levels as its material can support without padding. Triathlon has three levels; football has the Laws of the Game as a separate ladder beside its knowledge levels.

The ten levels

Level	Name	What it typically holds
1	Beginner	How the game works: the shape of a match, the ground, the kit, how you score and how you win
2	Elementary	The rules in practice: what the officials decide and why
3	Pre-Intermediate	The craft: technique, positions, basic tactics
4	Intermediate	The competitive game: competitions, structure, history, records
5	Upper-Intermediate	The modern game: systems, technology, analytics, context
6	Advanced	Tactical systems and how a team runs them
7	Upper-Advanced	Positional specialisms and situations
8	Expert	Coaching and player development
9	Master	History and the evolution of ideas
10	Professional	The competitive landscape today

The names are the same in every sport so that the product speaks one language. What a level holds varies by sport, because a Beginner in cricket needs the ways of getting out and a Beginner in futsal needs the four-second rule. The level number is also the difficulty: there is no separate difficulty setting on a question.

What a sub-level is

A sub-level is one topic inside a level, with its own name and its own guide page on this site. “Ways of Getting Out” is a sub-level of cricket level 1; “Open Water Swimming” of triathlon level 1; “Blocks and Defensive Organisation” of football level 6. A sub-level holds several tests, each on a narrower subject: ways of getting out has one test on bowled and caught, one on lbw, one on run out and stumped, and so on.

Most sports use five sub-levels per level. Football uses ten. The number of tests inside a sub-level follows the material: football and triathlon run ten tests per sub-level, cricket five or six, futsal five. A sub-level is never stretched to a round number by adding questions that restate what it already asked; when a topic runs out at five tests, the sub-level has five tests. The reasons are in No question twice.

Sized to the material

The ladder is ten rungs long, but a sport does not have to use all ten. Triathlon has three levels, five sub-levels each, ten tests per sub-level: 1500 questions in total, and that was judged the depth the subject supports. Stretching it over ten levels would have produced filler, and filler is a defect, not a bonus.

Levels are also planned one at a time. The plan for a level is written when the level before it is finished, so that it is informed by what the corpus turned out to hold rather than by a guess made months earlier. Each later level must go deeper than the survey beneath it, not cover the same ground again. The rule an author is held to is that the question must be new, not merely the topic: a topic surveyed in ten questions has room for a hundred deeper ones, but only below the depth the survey reached.

What each sport currently covers

Sport	Levels with published guides	Shape
Cricket	1 to 5, Beginner to Upper-Intermediate	Five sub-levels per level, five or six tests per sub-level
Futsal	1 to 3, Beginner to Pre-Intermediate	Five sub-levels per level, five tests per sub-level; the plan for all ten levels is written
Football	5 and 6, Upper-Intermediate and Advanced	Ten sub-levels per level, ten tests per sub-level
Football, Laws of the Game	Laws 4 to 17	One ladder per Law, each split into sub-levels by clause, 61 tests in all
Triathlon	1 to 3, the whole course	Five sub-levels per level, ten tests per sub-level

Football’s earlier levels exist in the app, but their guides are not on this site yet; the two levels shown here are the ones written under the current rules from the start.

The Laws of the Game as their own ladder

Football’s Laws of the Game are tested separately from football knowledge. Each Law from 4 to 17 is its own unit, split into sub-levels by clause: Law 12, Fouls and Misconduct, is the largest and has six sub-levels, from the direct free kick and the level of the challenge through to sending-off offences. A learner who wants to know the rules and only the rules can work through the Laws without the tactical levels, and a referee can revise one Law at a time. Every question in this ladder cites the IFAB edition it was written against, see Sources we write from.

Why the structure matters for measurement

The sub-level is the unit a guide page explains, and the level is the unit a score is read at. Keeping topics inside named sub-levels is what lets Insporta report where a learner is strong and where they are not, rather than a single number; the research behind that choice is in Three levels of cognition and How Insporta applies the research.