I was just sitting there, late one night, scrolling through some old European football highlights, when I saw a clip of a Rangers vs. Lyon game from years back. It immediately sparked this stupid argument I’d had with my mate months ago about who actually had the upper hand historically when these two clubs meet up. He swore up and down that Lyon owned the tie. I was positive it was more balanced, maybe even leaning slightly toward the Scottish side, if you counted everything.
I figured, what the heck, I’ll settle this thing once and for all. I decided to pull together a definitive timeline. How hard could it be? Famous clubs, tons of history. I thought I’d spend maybe an hour Googling and cross-referencing Wikipedia entries. Man, I was such an idiot.
The Initial Smash into a Data Wall
The first searches were completely useless. They give you the Champions League group stage results from 2007 and maybe the last Europa League tie. But these two clubs have met a whole lot more than just those marquee European nights. They play friendlies, they show up at random pre-season tournaments in Austria or Turkey, and those records? They are scattered, inconsistent, and often reported differently depending on the source.
I started with the official club records. Rangers’ site is okay for the big stuff. Lyon’s site is okay too, but they often treat non-competitive games as just training sessions and don’t bother logging the final score or the exact date properly. The internet quickly showed me that if I wanted a real, detailed timeline, I couldn’t rely on the easy stuff. I had to turn into a low-grade football historian.
I realized I needed to define what “counts” right away. Did a closed-door training session with mixed squads count? Absolutely not. Did a recognized, sanctioned pre-season cup game count? Yes, those results are part of the rivalry story. This process of setting the boundaries of the data collection took a good chunk of time before I even started the real work.
The Manual Scrape: A Detective Story
Forget automated tools, forget quick API calls. This was old-fashioned, manual digging. I started hitting up football history forums, those dusty corners of the internet where people argue about line-ups from 1985. I had three main objectives for every potential match:
- Date and Exact Venue confirmation.
- Official competition status verification.
- The definitive scoreline, including goalscorers if I could find them.
Finding the confirmed scores for those obscure mid-summer friendlies was a nightmare. For a game listed in 1999, one archive said it was a 1-1 draw. Another, sourced from an old Scottish newspaper index, claimed Rangers won 2-1. So what did I do? I had to find the original match report, often a grainy scan of a tiny column in a sports section, just to verify the details. I spent maybe six hours just tracking down one pre-season tournament in Germany where the two teams met but only the winner of the tournament was listed, not the actual head-to-head score.
I used a massive spreadsheet—nothing fancy, just Excel—to log everything. Every confirmed entry got color-coded: blue for European competition, red for friendlies. The unconfirmed ones stayed yellow until I could find a secondary source to lock it down. It felt like I was piecing together an ancient manuscript.
Building the Timeline and the Shocking Conclusion
The total volume of matches, once I included the proper friendlies, was much higher than either my mate or I had initially guessed. We were both totally focused on the Champions League ties, ignoring a decade of European summer preparation where these teams often crossed paths. When you just look at the competitive games, the record is tight. When you dump in all the official exhibitions and non-competitive matches? The picture changes completely.
After all that heavy lifting—sifting through French football archives, cross-referencing referee names, and dealing with conflicting dates from pre-internet eras—I finally had a complete, chronological list. Every confirmed game, every verified score, right down to the year the stadiums looked totally different.
The result? I had to admit my mate was slightly more correct, but for the wrong reasons. Lyon did have the better overall record, but not by the margin he claimed, and the competitive history was far more split than either of us remembered. The biggest takeaway from this whole project wasn’t the final tally, though. It was realizing how completely messy historical sports data is. People think it’s all organized and neat, but I can tell you, unless it’s the Premier League final score from last week, you’re basically wading through mud trying to find the truth.
I finally sent the detailed breakdown to my friend. He spent about ten minutes arguing about one specific 1980s result before shutting up and agreeing that my timeline was solid. It was a massive pain, a total time sink, but now I’ve got the definitive proof. And that’s what this whole blogger thing is about, right? Doing the hard work so the next person doesn’t have to argue based on hazy memories.
The final timeline is now complete, every scratchy detail verified. I’m telling you, finding that full, validated history of Rangers vs. Lyon took about ten times longer than calculating the capital gains tax on my last house sale. But hey, now we know.