The Absolute Mess of Finding Old Sports Stats
I started this little project last week, honestly, purely because my buddy, Mike, kept going on and on about how this one striker, who plays for his local team now, was the most dominant force in women’s football history. I told him he was talking rubbish. You gotta look at the history, man! You can’t just go by who’s scoring goals this season. So I challenged him. I told him I’d dig up the actual stats for the 2010 tournament, back when the real heavy hitters were playing, and show him who truly owned the pitch. That’s how this whole thing kicked off.
I figured this would take me maybe ten minutes, right? Just type in “2010 Women’s World Cup Top Scorers” and bam, instant Wikipedia list. Boy, was I wrong. I immediately ran into a wall, or rather, a series of tiny, annoying walls.
The first site I clicked on gave me a list of four players tied with five goals. The second site, an archived news report, listed only three players with five goals, and then showed someone else with four goals who wasn’t even on the first list. I swear, the data for anything older than five years is just a total mess online. Everyone copies everyone else, and if the original source was wrong, then 50 other websites are wrong too.
I realized I couldn’t just trust a quick search. If I was going to shut Mike up, I needed the real deal, verified numbers, complete with minutes played and assists, which are the true tie-breakers in these things. I decided to abandon the easy search route and go deep.
Digging Through the Digital Archives
My methodology had to change immediately. I couldn’t just trust a single table. I needed multiple cross-references, and I needed to find the official tournament reports, not just some fan-made wiki page. This is where the real work began.
First, I opened up a new spreadsheet, ready to be filled with data points I could trust. I started searching specifically for “FIFA 2010 Tournament Summary PDF” and “Official Match Reports 2010 Women’s Football.” This took forever. I had to click through about fifteen pages of search results, ignoring all the commercial sites trying to sell me old jerseys.
I finally located two key documents. One was an archived press release that listed every goal scored in the knockout stages, and the other was a surprisingly detailed, but poorly formatted, results page from an international sports body that gave goal timings. The numbers weren’t easy to read because the formatting was terrible—it was like they just pasted a huge text block into a low-res image. I had to manually transcribe the names and goal counts for every player mentioned who scored more than two goals. This step alone took nearly two hours just to get the preliminary names down.
The biggest headache, however, was cleaning the names. Because the data sources were from different countries, some players had full names, some had nicknames, and some were spelled with different accents that confused my basic copy-pasting efforts. I had to manually look up each name to ensure ‘Marta Vieira da Silva’ wasn’t accidentally counted as two different people just because one source only called her ‘Marta’ and another used the full formal name.
The Tally and The Tie-Breakers
Once I felt confident about the names and goal totals (after cross-referencing three separate sources and making sure they all agreed on the final five-goal mark), I needed the tie-breakers. You know how it is—if three players score the same number of goals, the true winner is the one with the most assists, or failing that, the one who played the least amount of time.
Finding the assists data was brutal. The old press releases often tracked goals, but assists were either completely ignored or buried deep within individual match reports. I spent another hour just pulling up the box scores for every group stage game these top players participated in. I focused my search narrowly on finding specific assist counts.
Here’s the breakdown I finally confirmed. It was satisfying to finally see clean, reliable data:
- Player A: 5 Goals, 4 Assists, 450 Minutes Played
- Player B: 5 Goals, 2 Assists, 510 Minutes Played
- Player C: 4 Goals, 3 Assists, 390 Minutes Played
- Player D: 4 Goals, 1 Assist, 480 Minutes Played
I used the verified counts to determine the actual winner. Even though two players were tied on five goals, Player A clearly dominated the field because of the assists count. She was the absolute champion of that tournament, no question about it.
The Final Realization
The funny thing is, the final answer I got wasn’t wildly different from the quick Google searches I started with, but the confidence I had in that answer was night and day. When I started, I was just guessing based on unreliable data. Now, I had the full ledger, proven by official records I had manually wrestled into shape. It proved to me that sometimes, you just have to do the legwork yourself, especially when dealing with slightly older stats that the major websites haven’t bothered to polish up.
I sent the final spreadsheet to Mike, complete with the links to the archived reports (which he probably won’t even click on). I didn’t even have to argue. The numbers spoke for themselves. It just goes to show you that a few hours of digging and organizing can solve any stupid sports debate. Plus, now I have this amazing, definitive data set saved, just waiting for the next time someone claims the current generation is somehow better than the legends of 2010.