The whole thing started because I got into a ridiculous, totally pointless argument with my neighbour. He was dead set on hosting a “World Cup Classics” retro viewing party, and he needed the exact kick-off times for all the 2006 matches, translated perfectly to our current time zone.
I told him I’d find it. Piece of cake, right? It’s only 2006, not 1966. Man, was I wrong.
The Initial Hunt: Why Everything Was Broken
I started where anyone starts: I fired up the laptop and slammed the usual keywords into the search bar. What came back was a total mess. Trust me, I spent about an hour just clicking through the first ten pages of results. Here is what I immediately ran into:
- The main links that came up were old forum threads from 2006, and naturally, they all had broken or dead external links.
- I tracked down a few “official” looking PDF schedules, but every single one of them was either corrupted, completely blank, or just showed the CET (Central European Time) without any clear reference to daylight savings.
- The big sports networks’ archived pages only listed the results, not the original broadcast schedule, meaning the kickoff times were often just the match duration, not the scheduled start. That’s useless for planning.
I realized this wasn’t going to be a quick “download and done” job. It needed a full, manual scrape and build.
The Real Grind: Sifting Through the Time Zones
I had to totally change my approach. I needed a single, verifiable source of truth, but since the official site was long gone, I had to build it myself. The key issue was always the time zone conversion, specifically the difference between CET and CEST (Central European Summer Time, which Germany was using) and my own EST zone. Daylight savings messes everything up.
I first opened up a fresh spreadsheet and copied every single match from the main Wikipedia 2006 tournament page. That gave me the match numbers and the dates. But the times were the problem. They were listed as UTC+2, which is CEST.
I then turned to archiving projects. I searched for old news articles from major international papers published in June 2006. I specifically looked for ones that published a schedule on their physical print day. Why print? Because print often included the local-to-them time conversion.
I found a scanned image of a UK newspaper’s pull-out guide. It listed the times in BST (British Summer Time). That was gold. I had a solid anchor. Now I just had to calculate the difference.
- I converted the UK times (BST) back to UTC (subtracting one hour).
- Then, I converted UTC to my EST zone (subtracting four hours).
I cross-referenced my first 16 converted group matches against the Wikipedia-listed UTC+2 times. I found three glaring, messy errors in my initial manual calculation. I completely trashed that first conversion sheet and started fresh, using an online calculator specifically set to historical time periods, just to be sure. It was tedious, slow work, but I was determined to get it right. I ticked off all 64 matches one by one, verifying the date and the exact EST kick-off time.
Why I Had the Time to Do This Nonsense
Look, anyone rational would have given up after the first hour. Why did I spend an entire afternoon manually converting old football times? This is where the story gets really personal, and why I had the necessary block of undisturbed time.
I know what it’s like to be treated like you don’t exist. A couple of years ago, I left my old company, a huge software firm, because they pulled an absolute shocker. I was put on an intense project, working crazy hours, then they suddenly announced an office closure in our region. Instead of a proper severance, they tried to force everyone to relocate across the country or take a minimal payout.
I refused to relocate. I fought them tooth and nail for a fair severance. It dragged on for nearly six months. During that whole period, I was essentially in limbo—no job, but still fighting for my rights. I had my laptop, a very unhappy spouse, and absolutely no momentum. I felt like I had been wiped out of the system. I spent months doing nothing but administrative paperwork and filling out forms.
Suddenly, I had all the time in the world, and I absolutely hated it. My energy was gone. I needed something completely pointless, something I could finish, something that had a clear, verifiable end result that the corporate chaos couldn’t touch.
So, when my neighbor asked for the schedule, it wasn’t a favor; it was a way to prove to myself that I could still complete a project from start to finish. It was a stupid, meaningless task that was totally under my control. It took my mind off the legal back-and-forth and the constant worry about money. That schedule, those 64 converted times, they represented a small, solid victory.
That’s how I ended up with the final, absolutely solid schedule. I’m sharing it now because if you ever need to settle a bar bet or plan a retro party, you won’t have to endure the time-zone hell that I fought my way through during the worst six months of my working life.