The title today talks about the best U-20 Women’s World Cup stats, right? You see those highlight reels and the standard lists—most goals, Golden Boot winner, all that noise. But anyone who’s ever really dug into the actual game knows those simple lists are a total lie. They tell you who got lucky, not who carried the team.
My goal was simple: find the real workhorses. I had to build it myself because the official sites? Forget it. The data is a scattered mess, missing key pieces, and sometimes just plain wrong. I started by hitting up every corner of the internet. I pulled data from three different archives, a couple of old news sites, and even some unofficial fan wikis. It was a digital salvage operation. I ripped out the basic goal-and-assist numbers, which were fine for a baseline, but that’s where the easy stuff ended.
Wrestling the Numbers into Submission
I realized quickly that goals and assists were maybe 60% of the story. So, I took all those names, all those game logs, and shoved it into a gigantic spreadsheet. My first big job was cleaning it—tons of duplicate names, players listed by their full name in one place and a nickname in another. I spent a good five hours just matching up names and countries. I had to manually cross-reference the player rosters from four different tournament years just to be sure I wasn’t mixing up two different midfielders with the same common surname. That part was a nightmare.
After that, the fun started. I added my own columns, my own metrics, the stuff that showed impact. Forget shots on goal; I was looking for:
- Key Passes Leading to Shots: Not just official assists, but the passes two steps before the goal. I had to re-watch clips for this.
- Successful Take-ons (in the attacking third): Who was actually beating defenders and creating space?
- High-Press Recoveries: Who won the ball back right after losing it? Showing that hunger.
I spent about a week just churning through old footage, sometimes on dodgy streaming sites, just to manually tally up those specific actions. It was tedious, but it was the only way to get a true picture. I wanted to see who made the machine run, not just who pushed the final button.
The Real Reason I Dove This Deep
Why did I bother with all this effort for a U-20 tournament? That’s where the personal part comes in, and trust me, it’s not as simple as “I love stats.”
Earlier this year, I was working at this small, hyper-aggressive start-up. They loved the hustle culture, the 24/7 emails. My boss was this guy who thought every problem could be solved by just working later. I had a small side project, nothing major, helping a local youth team with their fitness tracking. It was maybe an hour of work a day.
Then my kid got sick—not serious, but enough that I had to be home for three days straight. I told my boss I’d be checking emails but couldn’t come in. He said, “Fine, but since you’re ‘free,’ I need you to take over the entire database migration.” A massive, two-week job, just dumped on me with zero notice, because he thought “working from home” meant “free.” He said I needed to “earn my keep.”
I sat there that night, kid asleep, looking at his email demanding I start this soul-crushing migration. I looked at the old U-20 stats I had just started collecting as a distraction—that messy, incomplete spreadsheet. And I just drew the line. I thought, “This is garbage work. That’s garbage work. But this stats project? This is my garbage work.”
I replied to his email with a simple, “I’m focusing on my family obligations and prior commitments this week.” And then I just shut the laptop on the work stuff. I spent the next 72 hours deep in the stats project. I scratched out the real analysis. I finalized the rankings based on my new metrics. That quiet, focused work on something I owned was the first bit of peace I had felt in months.
When I finally went back to the office, he was furious about the migration, of course. He tried to pull the guilt trip. I just handed him the notice. I told him I wasn’t going to choose his fake work over my kid or over my own interests again. He kept calling, kept offering more money for weeks—like the Chinese example I know you’re thinking about—but I just kept blocking.
So, this stats analysis? It isn’t just a list of players. It’s the record of the exact moment I realized my own value and chose my own path. It’s proof that sometimes the most satisfying work is the work you do for yourself, just because you want the truth.
What did I find? Well, Player X from that obscure nation, the one with 1 goal and 2 official assists? My numbers show she was generating 70% of her team’s goal-scoring opportunities. Total surprise. The real story is always hiding under the surface, you just have to dig deep enough to find it.