Getting the Dirt on the 2002 FIFA World Cup Group Stages
I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for ages. I decided to nail down every single group stage match time for the 2002 World Cup. It sounds like a total waste of a Saturday, I know, but trust me, this was personal. You think this data is easy to find, right? Just a quick search and bam—schedule pops up. Wrong. Absolutely dead wrong.
I figured I could knock this out in maybe an hour, tops. I fired up the old desktop and started my usual digging. I punched in every combination of search terms you could imagine: “Group A fixtures 2002,” “South Korea Japan group stage,” “all match times World Cup 2002.” The first wave of results was useless. All the big, glossy sports sites just give you the knockout round or a simplified bracket showing who played who and the final score. They gloss over the messy details—the actual kickoff times, the specific stadium names for every single group game. It was driving me nuts.
This “simple copy-paste job” quickly became an archaeological dig. I had to scroll past pages and pages of modern garbage and old, outdated news archives. I hit pay dirt when I stumbled onto some ancient, forum-style fan sites. You know the kind—terrible design, tiny fonts, probably hasn’t been updated since 2003. These old-school fans, bless their hearts, had meticulously recorded the data. But even then, I couldn’t just trust one source. I had to cross-reference at least three different sites to make sure the match between, say, Brazil and Turkey wasn’t listed at noon on one site and 2 PM on another. It was a nightmare of time zone conversions, too, trying to figure out if the recorded time was local to the venue or GMT. I spent a solid five hours just verifying whether Senegal’s first game started exactly when it said it did.
The whole exercise taught me something: when everyone moves on, the actual, granular history gets incredibly fragmented. I collected all the confirmed times and locations and just dumped them into a basic spreadsheet. That was the easy part—once I had the information, just compiling it was no biggie. I organized it by group, then sorted the matches chronologically. It’s clean now. It’s perfect. But why did I go to all that trouble for two-decades-old soccer data?
You want to know the real reason? It has nothing to do with football or nostalgia. It’s because of a guy named Gary. Gary was my boss at my last job, maybe five years back. He was one of those people who thought he was a genius because he could remember obscure sports stats. He wasn’t a good boss, but he was a massive know-it-all. He liked to make little side bets and challenges, mostly just to show off how much he knew compared to the rest of us schmucks. He always bragged about his personal “database” of historical World Cup data, claiming he had details that were “lost to the internet.”
The last time I talked to him—right before I completely moved on from that toxic workplace—he was cornering me at a staff party. He was talking down my skills, saying I was only good at the “fluffy front-end stuff” and didn’t have the patience for “deep, meticulous data work.” He specifically mentioned the 2002 World Cup group stages as an example. He said that schedule was so messy and spread across so many defunct sites that no one could possibly put together a complete, verified list without paying for some expensive, old archive service. He was daring me to find it, but in a condescending, you-can’t-do-it kind of way.
He was a real piece of work. Long story short, Gary completely screwed me over on a promotion I had earned, claiming my records weren’t “meticulous” enough for the role. I ended up packing my desk and walking out without so much as a two-week notice, just to get away from him and that whole nightmare. I vowed I’d get him back, even if it was over something stupid.
A few weeks ago, I heard through the grapevine that Gary is still at the same place, still making dumb bets. And I thought, “You know what? I’m going to do the impossible task he claimed was beyond me, just so I can casually drop it into a conversation someday.” This whole schedule? It wasn’t about the data; it was about proving a point to a memory of a jerk who thought attention to detail was beyond my reach.
Here’s the breakdown I ended up with. This wasn’t just a copy-paste; this was the result of blood, sweat, and five hours of spiteful research, just for one petty victory over a guy who doesn’t even know he’s been beaten.
The Final Data Structure (Group Stage Breakdown)
- The Process: I started chaotic, trying to pull from modern sites, and ended up having to dig into archived fan forums, which were the only places that kept the granular fixture details.
- Verification: I checked every single time against a major news organization’s archives from May/June 2002 to ensure accuracy, dismissing anything that looked like a modern summary.
- The Core Data Collected: I recorded the Date, Kick-off Time (local to Korea/Japan, then converted to a common reference), the Two Teams, the Score, and the Specific Stadium.
It’s done. It’s perfect. And every time I look at my clean, organized spreadsheet, I know I won that silly, unspoken challenge against Gary. Sometimes you have to put in the grunt work on something pointless just to prove to yourself—and the ghosts of bosses past—that you can do the meticulous, boring stuff better than anyone else. I’m ready to casually drop this piece of trivia any time I run into that guy. It was worth every minute of painful searching.