Connections Sports Edition #696 Answers

The Connections Sports Edition answers today, Thursday, August 20, 2026, split puzzle #696 into London soccer clubs, Houston sports stars, words that come before “count”, and NHL goal songs.

The board hides its trap in plain sight, and it involves the one London club missing from the London group.

Connections Sports Edition Hints Today, August 20, 2026 (#696)

Yellow: Four teams that share a single European capital.
Green: Celebrated athletes tied to one American city, across three different sports.
Blue: Read each entry as the first half of a familiar two-word phrase.
Purple: Arena music will help you here more than the standings will.

What Are Today’s Connections Sports Edition Answers? Puzzle #696

Yellow, London soccer clubs: ARSENAL, CRYSTAL PALACE, FULHAM, TOTTENHAM
Green, Houston sports stars, historically: BAGWELL, BIGGIO, MOON, OLAJUWON
Blue, can come before “count”: FULL, HARD, PITCH, SILENT
Purple, NHL goal songs: CHELSEA DAGGER, HOWL, LITHIUM, SHOUT

Why Connections Sports Edition #696 Is Harder Than It Looks

Start with what is not in the yellow group. Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Fulham and Tottenham are all London clubs, and the most famous London club of the lot is absent. Chelsea is on this board. It is sitting in purple, inside CHELSEA DAGGER, the Fratellis song the Chicago Blackhawks have played after goals for the better part of two decades. Read that title as a football reference and the life is gone before you have really started.

PITCH is the second trap, and it pulls in two directions at once. In British usage, the pitch is the field itself, which drags the word toward the London group. In American baseball, a pitch count is routine, and two of the green answers, Bagwell and Biggio, spent their careers with the Astros. PITCH belongs to neither category. It is blue.

That blue group is the quiet problem here, because every one of its answers is also a sports term. Full count and pitch count come from baseball, hard count and silent count from the line of scrimmage. A category defined by a word that never appears on the board still manages to look like a category about the sports that do.

The last snare is acoustic. HOWL, SHOUT and SILENT read as a set about volume, and three of the four tiles a noise group would need are right there in front of you. SILENT is blue. MOON compounds it, because you howl at one, but this MOON is Warren Moon, who threw for the Houston Oilers, and he sits in green beside a basketball centre and two baseball players.