Man, let me tell you about what I wasted half my afternoon on. It started as a stupid argument, you know? Just sitting around, messing about on the telly, and suddenly someone brings up the 2010 World Cup. Specifically, they were convinced, absolutely convinced, that Italy somehow scraped out of the group stage. I immediately called BS on that, but then I realized I couldn’t actually remember the full final rankings for all the groups.
I mean, I remember the big stuff—Spain winning, that ridiculous Ghana game, the noise. But the nitty-gritty standings? Nah. My memory’s a sieve these days. So, I figured, easy enough, right? I’ll just hit up the usual sport sites and grab the final table. Wrong.
Every place I checked gave me fragmented crap. One site had just the winners. Another one was buried under a paywall. A third one kept throwing up 2014 or 2018 results because their tagging system was a right mess. I didn’t want a clean, polished, API-driven result. I wanted the raw, verifiable facts, showing who was actually 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, with the points and everything. I got genuinely annoyed that such a basic piece of history was so hard to compile quickly. It turned into a personal mission, like digging up buried treasure.
The Digging Process: Going Old School
I binned the clean search terms. I started digging into the archives of old, slightly dodgy-looking football forums and niche sports blogs from that exact time period—late June, early July 2010. You know, the kind of sites that probably haven’t updated their CSS since the early 2000s. I wasn’t trusting the nice modern tables; I was looking for someone who had typed out the results right after the game finished.
I literally had four browser tabs open, comparing the final points tallies for each team, group by group. If three of the four agreed on the final ranking, I wrote it down on a notepad. I wasn’t going to build some fancy SQL query or script anything; this was a manual, elbow-grease operation. I was verifying Ghana’s second-place finish in Group D, confirming the USA/England drama in Group C, and cementing the fact that France was a complete dumpster fire in Group A. The sheer effort to piece together this puzzle was exhausting, but it felt good when it finally clicked into place.
The biggest confirmation was Group F. My buddy was right about Italy being there, but they were absolutely stone-cold last. They didn’t win a single game. They didn’t even scrape out a clean second place. They were four points, dead last, behind even New Zealand. That was the moment of victory.
The Final Ranks: Everything I Dug Up
After all that hunting and cross-referencing, here is the full, messy list I compiled. I’m sharing this because if I had to waste my time digging this up piece by piece, someone else might be looking for the exact same thing without the headache. This is the truth, verified across the darkest corners of 2010 web archives.
Group A
- 1st: Uruguay
- 2nd: Mexico
- 3rd: South Africa
- 4th: France
Group B
- 1st: Argentina
- 2nd: South Korea
- 3rd: Greece
- 4th: Nigeria
Group C
- 1st: USA
- 2nd: England
- 3rd: Slovenia
- 4th: Algeria
Group D
- 1st: Germany
- 2nd: Ghana
- 3rd: Australia
- 4th: Serbia
Group E
- 1st: Netherlands
- 2nd: Japan
- 3rd: Denmark
- 4th: Cameroon
Group F
- 1st: Paraguay
- 2nd: Slovakia
- 3rd: New Zealand
- 4th: Italy
Group G
- 1st: Brazil
- 2nd: Portugal
- 3rd: Ivory Coast
- 4th: North Korea
Group H
- 1st: Spain
- 2nd: Chile
- 3rd: Switzerland
- 4th: Honduras
The Takeaway
See? It’s all there. The pure, unadulterated facts from that tournament. The reason I bother sharing these kinds of practical records, these results from a messy afternoon of manual labor, is simple. You can download a clean CSV file from a statistics site, sure. But that doesn’t show you the effort, or the sheer frustration involved in tracking down something that should be publicly simple. It’s the difference between being handed a finished cake and seeing the flour on the baker’s hands. Sometimes you gotta get your hands dirty, and sometimes that little bit of personal verification feels way more satisfying than a quick copy/paste job. Anyway, that’s my practice for the day done. Now I owe my buddy twenty bucks, because I got the Italy bit right, but I was wrong about Portugal topping Group G. Turns out Brazil did. Crap.