The Weekend Where I Dug Up Old Football Reports
You know how it is. Sometimes you get stuck arguing with a buddy over something totally pointless. This time, it was the FIFA Club World Cup. My mate was convinced that because the UAE hosts it so much, they must have the best average attendance. It just sounded like nonsense to me. I mean, sure, they have the cash, but are the seats actually filled? I told him I’d check. I’m not gonna lie, I regretted it about five minutes later when I realized what a total mess this data was going to be.
I committed, though. So, I started the process. The title for this deep dive was officially Compare Fifa Club World Cup Attendance by Host Country: Which Nation Wins?
My first move wasn’t going to some fancy sports data site. That stuff is always wrong or pays no mind to context. I went straight to the source, or as close as I could get: the tournament reports. I started scrolling, and I mean really scrolling, through old FIFA press releases and archived yearly summaries. This is where the whole thing kicked off.
I realized I couldn’t just trust the “official” total attendance number they sometimes threw out. Those numbers often get fudged or they don’t give you the full story on capacity. So, I scrapped that idea. I decided I had to go game-by-game for every single tournament hosted since the format changed around 2005. That meant a lot of digging.
I fired up a fresh spreadsheet. I used Google Sheets because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to mess with Excel just yet. I started inputting the columns:
- Host Nation
- Year
- Match ID (just a number for me)
- Reported Attendance
- Stadium Seating Capacity
- Calculated Fill Rate (%)
I crawled through various news archives for the early years hosted by Japan and the UAE. Japan, man. Their capacity numbers were huge, but those early games? Empty seats everywhere. The official reports were terrible for filling in the blanks, so I had to cross-reference local newspaper reports to get the most accurate number on capacity for some of the older, smaller venues. I was constantly switching tabs, verifying figures, and getting totally swamped in thousands of tiny numbers.
The host nations I was really focusing on were Japan, the UAE, Morocco, and Qatar. My process for each host looked basically the same:
- Gathered the attendance figure for all 7-8 matches hosted that year.
- Verified the stadium capacities for those specific venues.
- Averaged the attendance for the entire tournament.
- Calculated the average stadium fill rate (this was the real decider).
The UAE hosting years were a headache. They used smaller stadiums for a few runs, which artificially made their “fill rate” look better than their raw attendance. But then they’d move back to the big boys, and the numbers dropped. Japan had massive raw attendance, but their percentage fill rate was often weak because their stadiums are huge. Morocco, on the other hand, was always punchy. Smaller raw numbers, but the fans there really pack them in. Qatar was intense, but they only hosted a few games before the World Cup mania hit.
When I finally finished compiling and averaging all the data—I’m talking about maybe 15 tournaments’ worth of stats—the winner for the best average fill rate wasn’t even close. Morocco absolutely smoked everyone. They had higher percentage numbers than every single UAE tournament. Japan had the raw volume, but Morocco had the passion, according to the data I pulled.
So, I won the argument. Great. But why did I spend an entire Saturday afternoon going this deep into something that should have been a five-minute Google search? Why do I even bother with these messy, granular deep-dives?
I know all this because I used to hate my life, basically. This current habit, this need to dig into the annoying details, it all stems from a horrible job I had five years ago. I was working for a medium-sized logistics firm, stuck in a data entry and reporting role. The manager, a guy named Barry, was the absolute worst. He was obsessed with pointless metrics. I’m talking about tracking how long a coffee break was, down to the second. One day, he made me spend eight full hours compiling a spreadsheet of every single international shipment delay over three months, and then demanded I manually re-categorize them by the phase of the moon. I’m serious. The moon.
I snapped. I just stood up, looked at that idiotic spreadsheet, and realized my soul was literally dying. I walked out right there and then, still wearing my company lanyard. Didn’t even grab my coat.
The next few months were rough, man. I had zero income. I was burning through what little savings I had. Barry, that prick, actually had the nerve to email me later demanding my resignation letter, saying I hadn’t followed proper protocol. I deleted the email and blocked him.
But the one thing I learned from that hell-hole was how to systematically break down massive, chaotic sets of data and force them into some kind of structure. It was the only useful skill I got. I realized I could apply that same horrible, soul-crushing effort Barry demanded, but to things that I actually cared about. Football attendance, old car stats, whatever.
So, yeah, that’s how I ended up spending my Saturday sifting through stadium capacities for the Club World Cup. It’s not about the football anymore; it’s about the habit of doing the hard, messy work myself and proving a point—even if the point is just that Barry was an idiot and I can now use his tactics against his will. The results are messy, but they’re mine. Morocco wins, by the way. Tell your friend he owes you a beer.