Man, sometimes you get dragged into the dumbest stuff, and it suddenly becomes the most serious thing in your life. This whole chase to figure out how far apart Espanyol and Real Betis are right now? It wasn’t some academic project. It was about a silly, decades-old promise that was finally due.
My older cousin, the one who always thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, screwed me over years ago. Christmas, 2018. We were talking about Spanish football, and he bet me a ridiculously huge sum—like, enough to cover my mortgage for a year—that if, at any point five years later, the point gap between those two teams was exactly four points in Betis’s favor, I had to pay. If it was anything else, he paid me. Total absurdity, right? We shook on it, totally forgot about it, until two weeks ago when he suddenly messaged me, “Tick-tock, buddy.”
I started sweating. I had to know the distance, and I had to know it right now. Not yesterday’s news, not last week’s recap. I needed the live, updated standings because the whole thing was finalized based on the standings right before the next transfer window closed. And that window was closing fast.
My first move? The usual dumb stuff. I just threw “Espanyol vs Real Betis points” into the search bar. What did I get? A total mess. I got articles talking about the last time they played. I got predictions for next season. I got some sketchy site that looked like it hadn’t been updated since 2015. I realized fast that just googling the general standings wasn’t going to cut it. It was too broad. Like trying to fix a leaky faucet with a hammer. You’re hitting the problem, but not solving it.
I needed precision. I needed the actual, raw league table data, and I needed to verify it against two or three sources immediately, because if I got this wrong, I’d be broke. Or worse, I’d have to listen to my cousin brag for the next decade.
The Ugly Grind: Digging Out the Real Numbers
I decided to ditch the general news sites and went straight to where the data should be housed. I needed to see the actual tables, not just the highlights. This wasn’t a five-minute job; this became an obsessive three-hour deep dive. I opened up three different reliable sources—one official league tracker, one major international sports hub, and one independent data collector that I usually trust for historical stats. I had to pull out four critical pieces of data for each team and manually calculate the difference.
Here’s what I had to confirm for both teams simultaneously:
- Total Matches Played: Gotta make sure they both played the same number of games, or the standing is misleading.
- Total Points Earned: The most important piece of information, obviously.
- Goal Differential: This is the tie-breaker, and I needed it just in case those points were exactly equal.
- Last Update Time Stamp: Crucial. Was the table updated after yesterday’s late game? Or was it stale?
I found myself refreshing all three pages on separate tabs, clicking back and forth like a crazy person. The tension was real. Betis had just won a tough match against a bottom-half team, but Espanyol had tied a game they should have won. The points were shifting daily, sometimes hourly, depending on how the data pipeline fed into the tracker.
I remember sitting there at 2 AM, spilling lukewarm coffee all over my keyboard, staring at the screen. One site showed a 5-point lead for Betis. Another, slightly older update, showed 4 points. My heart dropped. If the older one was right, I was cooked. I had to wait for the official league source to update its data feed, which felt like waiting for paint to dry in the Arctic.
The Final Tally and What It Cost Me
I finally settled on the most reliable source after watching the timestamp change in real time. This manual, exhausting verification process was the only way to be 100% sure. I couldn’t trust some aggregated headline.
I pulled the current standings for Real Betis, which put them squarely at 48 points after 29 fixtures. I cross-referenced that immediately with Espanyol’s standing, which showed they were sitting at 41 points after the same 29 fixtures.
I grabbed my calculator, shaky hands and all. 48 minus 41. That leaves a 7-point difference. Seven points! Not the exact four points my cousin had bet on. I let out a massive yell that probably woke the neighbors. I had dodged a bullet. The massive sum was safe, and better yet, my cousin was now on the hook for his half of the bet—which, thankfully, was a less painful amount, but still satisfying.
Why did I bother going through this painful manual data collection instead of just trusting the first search result? Because when the stakes are high—whether it’s a massive family bet or designing systems that can’t fail—you cannot rely on generalized, unverified information. You have to physically dig into the source, confirm the timestamp, and manually calculate the outcome. This silly football tracking job reminded me that sometimes, the hardest, least automated way is the only way to ensure the data you base your life on is actually correct.