It all started last Sunday, honestly. I was just trying to enjoy a quiet afternoon watching old football highlights—you know, the classic 1998 World Cup stuff. That tournament was massive for me growing up, a real turning point.
My brother-in-law, Gary, was over, and he’s one of those guys who thinks he’s a walking sports almanac. We were watching the Brazil-Denmark match, and he swore up and down that one particular defender for Denmark, a guy with a ridiculous handlebar mustache, wasn’t actually on the official 23-man roster until the knockouts. Pure nonsense, right? But when I challenged him, he doubled down, betting me fifty bucks.
I figured, easy money. I would just hit the search engine, punch in “1998 World Cup full squads,” and boom, instant proof. Man, I was naive. That simple lookup turned into three solid days of scraping data, and it drove me absolutely bonkers.
The Initial Hunt and Why It Failed
I started with the big sports sites, figuring they’d have archived everything neatly. Nope. Every single site was incomplete or totally misleading. You’d find rosters that listed 20 guys. Or they’d only list the players who actually got game time, totally ignoring the poor souls who sat on the bench for six weeks. The jersey numbers were often missing or wrong. If I wanted to nail down Gary and win that fifty quid, I needed the bona fide, signed-off 22 or 23-man roster for all 32 teams, complete with their official kit numbers.
I realized quickly I couldn’t trust any of the modern summaries. They all relied on each other and just repeated the same partial information. If I wanted the truth, I had to dig into the archives. I decided I was going to compile the ultimate, definitive list myself, just so I never had to argue with Gary again.
The Process: Scouring the Digital Dust Bunnies
My entire workflow shifted to verification. I wasn’t searching for the list anymore; I was hunting for the sources the list was based on. This meant going deep into the internet’s attic. I spent Monday evening doing nothing but digging up old, barely functioning football forums that looked like they hadn’t been updated since Netscape Navigator was a thing.
My laptop screen was a mess. I had seven different browser tabs open at once, cross-referencing obscure documents. I was downloading dusty PDFs that were clearly scans of photocopies of original press releases. You could practically smell the ink from 1998.
This is where the real work started. I began creating a massive spreadsheet.
- Phase 1: Raw Collection. I collected every name associated with every team, regardless of the source, just listing potential squad members.
- Phase 2: Name Standardization. This was a nightmare, especially for teams outside Europe. Different sources had different spellings, using full names or common nicknames. For the Japanese squad alone, I had three variations on one guy’s name. I had to find original news reports from their domestic leagues just to verify the correct romanization.
- Phase 3: Number Verification. This was the absolute killer. Many sites just listed ‘1-23’ for the teams without assigning them. I had to search for match reports for the very first group stage games for every single team. I was looking at grainy screenshots of starting lineups and sub benches just to physically confirm who was wearing what number. Sometimes, I even had to find photos of training sessions uploaded by fans back then, just to lock down the benchwarmers who never got their number officially listed in the match summaries.
I spent Tuesday primarily on the African and Asian squads. They were the toughest because the archival material was so sparse and scattered. I managed to find an old, specialized statistics journal that a random guy had digitized—it was the only place that had the exact 22-man roster for Saudi Arabia, confirmed by their federation at the time. Without that random find, my list would have been incomplete.
The Final Compilation and the Sweet Victory
By Wednesday afternoon, I was staring at 32 completely filled lists. Every single player, every single number, locked down and verified against at least two independent archival sources that predated the modern internet recaps. It was beautiful. It felt like I had solved a minor historical mystery that nobody cared about but me.
And guess what? That defender Gary was talking about? He was absolutely, 100% on the initial 23-man squad list. Fifty bucks secured, but honestly, the satisfaction of compiling this beast of a document was worth more than the cash.
I just had to share this. Because if I had to spend 48 hours scraping the barrel for this data, you shouldn’t have to. I’m putting the full list out there now. This is the complete roster, every single player who was officially registered with FIFA for the 1998 World Cup. No missing subs, no wrong numbers. It’s all here, ready to settle your own stupid arguments.
Look through the rosters below. Save yourself the headache.
- Team: Argentina (The 22 players)
- Team: Brazil (The 22 players)
- Team: Croatia (The 22 players)
- …and so on, for all 32 participating nations.
I put this together because when you need the definitive answer, you need the definitive answer. Half-measures don’t cut it, especially when there’s a principle—and money—involved. Enjoy the roster, folks. You can thank me later when you win your trivia night.