Man, let me tell you, this whole thing started with an argument. A stupid, petty argument that escalated faster than a wildfire. You know how it is. You’re having beers, watching some old highlight reels, and the 1998 World Cup in France comes up. That tournament was legendary, right? The kits, the drama, Ronaldo’s weird pre-final episode. Anyway, my buddy, Mark, swears blind that some obscure defender from Paraguay, let’s call him Ramon, wore number 19. I distinctly remembered Ramon was number 13. We were both absolutely positive. We decided to settle it right then and there. Simple Google search, right? Wrong.
I grabbed my phone and we started clicking around. First stop, Wikipedia. Usually solid, but nope. It listed the squads, sure, but they were incomplete for half the smaller teams. Missing the exact shirt numbers for a few guys, and sometimes even omitting the third-string keeper. We were arguing specifically about squad number integrity, so ‘close enough’ wasn’t going to cut it. We needed the official, definitive list that FIFA used back in June 1998. It was turning into a major point of pride.
I spent the next two days obsessively trying to prove Mark wrong, or maybe prove myself wrong, I wasn’t even sure anymore. It just drove me nuts that this foundational historical sports data wasn’t readily available in one clean spot.
The Great Data Dig: Getting Off the Surface
My first attempts were too simple. I searched using broad terms like “1998 World Cup official roster PDF” and “all 1998 squad numbers.” That brought up dead links, forum posts from 2005, and those unreliable fan sites. Most sources copied each other, and if the original source was wrong, they all perpetuated the same error. I realized I had to dig into the archival data.
I shifted tactics. I started targeting specific national federations’ archives. I figured maybe the FFF (French Football Federation) or FIFA themselves must have published a full, unedited press kit back in the day. I fumbled around in FIFA’s official document repository, which is an absolute nightmare to navigate, believe me. After fighting their terrible search function for hours, I managed to unearth a few old scanned press releases. They were poor quality, grainy scans, but they confirmed names and birth dates.
But the numbers were still elusive for teams like Jamaica and Saudi Arabia. Their lists seemed to be taken from pre-tournament friendlies, not the finalized 22 (or 23, I forget which they used that year—another thing I had to check!) sent to FIFA.
The Deep Dive and Manual Verification
This is where the real work started. I needed visual confirmation, cross-referenced with hard data. I started watching full match replays of the early group stage games—I mean, actually watching the opening credits where the line-ups flash up on the screen, pausing and squinting. I cross-referenced the numbers shown on screen with the limited roster lists I had already pulled.
I found that old sports news archives were gold. I accessed historical databases of major European and South American sports papers—the ones that would have had correspondents actually at the training camps. I used advanced search filters to pinpoint articles published right after the final squad declarations in late May 1998. That’s when I finally started compiling my own master spreadsheet.
Here’s the process I settled on:
- I created 32 separate tabs, one for each nation.
- For each player, I logged their name, position, club at the time, and crucially, their shirt number.
- If I found three independent, verifiable sources (e.g., FIFA archive, official match report, and a contemporary newspaper article) that agreed on the number, I flagged it as confirmed data.
- If sources conflicted, I tracked down video evidence to decide the final truth. This happened surprisingly often, especially with players who barely featured.
It took me nearly two full weeks, working evenings after my actual job, to solidify the entire 704-player list. I had to clean up inconsistencies in player names (did you know how many different ways Spanish names were transliterated in the late 90s press? A nightmare!). I standardized every piece of data so it was all uniform and usable.
The satisfaction of finally having a complete, confirmed, 100% reliable list of all 704 names and their kit numbers? Unbeatable. Oh, and about the original argument? Mark was wrong. Ramon was 13. I won the bragging rights, but honestly, the real win was completing this archival project. Now we have the definitive list, and I’m sharing every single name we found.
