Man, finding proper, granular data on historical football matches is often a pain in the neck. You think because it’s a massive sport, every stat should be sitting there, ready to download in a neat spreadsheet. Wrong. Especially when you try to drill down into something specific like the full, reliable historical record—goals, wins, and losses—between two specific teams like Valencia C.F. and Athletic Club.
I started this project because I needed the absolute truth, not just some summarized, commercial site’s quick overview. I wasn’t just counting totals; I was trying to verify the specific context of certain games going back three decades. That meant I couldn’t trust Wikipedia or the big American sports platforms.
The Initial Hunt: Hitting Dead Ends
First thing I did was the usual stupid search. I typed in “Valencia Athletic Club head to head historical stats” into the engine. What did that land me? A bunch of aggregated betting sites showing the last 10 games, maybe. Absolutely useless if you’re trying to track a pattern of draws in the 1990s or prove which specific match had that crazy four-goal comeback. I wasted about an hour clicking through these commercial summaries, realizing they were all drawing from the same shallow pool of data.
I quickly moved on to the official league sites, La Liga and the Spanish Football Federation. Now, you’d think the official sources would be the best. They are, for current season stuff. But trying to get them to cough up a consistent, easily digestible list of results from, say, 1980 to 2010? Forget it. Their archives are usually built for browsing one season at a time, or they force you to use some clunky internal search tool that times out if you ask for too much data at once. I spent a good chunk of time trying to trick their site by manipulating dates in the URL, but that just ended in error messages.
Digging Deep: My System for Extracting Raw Data
When the easy paths fail, you have to remember that reliable data always exists, it’s just usually buried on some obscure site run by a stats fanatic or within a university archive. This is where I had to switch my strategy completely.
I needed sites that focused on pure historical record keeping, not daily reporting or betting odds. I knew from past statistical hunts that the best data often comes from sources that compile official match reports from local newspapers or federation papers, sometimes scanning them in themselves. I started searching in Spanish, using terms like “histórico resultados Athletic Valencia” and “actas oficiales Valencia Athletic.”
This led me down a rabbit hole of much smaller, specialized statistical databases. I finally hit gold with a couple of sites—one was focused purely on European club results and had built its entire backbone around cross-referencing official reports. It wasn’t pretty. The interface looked like it hadn’t been updated since 2005, but the data was rock solid.
Here’s how I structured my extraction process once I found the right sources:
- Verified the Source Authority: I checked if the site referenced the original competition year, not just the modern name. It needed to show specific matchday numbering.
- Manual Compilation: There was no export button. I had to manually sift through and copy the results. I decided to build my own spreadsheet, listing every single match between the two clubs since 1970.
- Detail Extraction: For each match, I meticulously recorded the date, the venue (Mestalla or San Mamés), the final score (obviously), and then cross-referenced the result (W/L/D).
- The Goal Detail Grunt Work: The real nightmare was the goal details. For recent matches (last 10-15 years), the goal scorers were easy. But for the 80s and 90s, sometimes the primary statistical site only listed the final score. I had to cross-reference that specific match date with archived newspaper reports (by searching archives of major Spanish papers) to try and confirm who actually scored. This was tedious, involving translating tiny archived PDFs, but it was the only way to get the “fully detailed” data I promised myself.
I spent two full days just compiling, verifying, and cleaning this data. Why the dedication? Why spend 16 hours proving something that probably 10 other people already know?
The Reason Behind The Madness
Well, I needed this specific, verifiable spreadsheet because of my neighbor, Javier. We always get into these ridiculous, pointless arguments about football history. Javier, who thinks he remembers every game since the earth cooled, insisted that Athletic Club had only won three times at Mestalla in the last 40 years, period. He was completely dismissive of any online stat summary I showed him, calling them “modern lies.”
We made a small, stupid bet: the loser has to clean the winner’s garage. My garage is a disaster zone. I was not losing that bet. I couldn’t just tell him he was wrong; I had to present the undeniable evidence—a document I personally verified, listing every match date and the exact score, proven by multiple historical records. My hard work wasn’t about the beauty of the data; it was about the satisfying feeling of slamming a printout of the comprehensive 50-match history onto his table, showing him the five times Athletic Club actually won at Mestalla during the 1980s alone, proving him spectacularly wrong.
The practice wasn’t quick, and it wasn’t easy, but by bypassing the commercial noise and going straight to the specialized archive sources, I managed to compile the most reliable, detailed record you could ask for. That’s the real trick to finding these deep historical stats—you have to be willing to do the manual labor the aggregate sites refuse to do.