My sister-in-law called me up last week, all stressed out. Her youngest kid is absolutely hooked on soccer, specifically the U-17 Women’s team. She was trying to plan a short little trip to get the kid down to the Dominican Republic, or at least figure out the best dates to take time off work to watch the matches live on TV. She was running in circles, just trying to nail down the group stage schedule.
“I just need the dates, man! Why is it such a mess?” she complained. She was bouncing between the official FIFA site, some random sports blog, and a travel advisory page, and they all had slightly different information or, worse, totally different time zones. The dates were there, but the times were the killer. She almost missed a huge game back in 2022 because of a messed-up calendar entry, and I felt bad for her. It’s always a nightmare trying to piece together a comprehensive schedule like this from scratch, especially when it crosses continents. The information is always scattered like someone threw paint at a wall.
I told her, “Just forget about it. I’ll handle it.” That’s the motivation. I hate being disorganized, and I hate when big organizations make simple things complicated. My practice today was simple: I was going to build the definitive, accurate, easy-to-read schedule for the entire 2024 FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup. Not just the groups, but the whole damn thing, all the way to the final, and most importantly, converted into a time zone that made sense to me and my audience without relying on some garbage online converter.
The Ugly Scrape and Tidy-Up Process
My first step was hitting the official tournament page. Big mistake. It was clunky. It gave me the basics, but it kept trying to shove links for tickets and hospitality down my throat, rather than just delivering the straightforward match times. Every group was on a separate accordion menu, which meant a ton of clicking and dragging. I realized right away that simply copying and pasting was never going to work.
I opened a clean, plain text file—no fancy software needed, just Notepad—and started manually pulling the data. I went group by group, A through D, writing down the teams, the venue (just the city, like Santo Domingo or Santiago), and the local kick-off time in the Dominican Republic (DRT). I did this for all 24 group matches. It felt like I was being paid by the click. I had to double-check the dates because some of the matches in a single group were split across different days.
This is where the real “practice” started: Time Zone Conversion. The DR uses Atlantic Standard Time (AST), which, depending on where you are, is a huge headache to constantly track. I had to pull up my trusty world clock, figure out the difference (for me, it was minus four hours), and then manually adjust every single one of those 24 kick-off times. I didn’t trust Google to do it perfectly for a future event; I needed to see it with my own eyes.
After the group stages were locked down, I moved onto the knockout rounds, which are always the trickiest part because they’re just placeholders. I had to look for the official bracket structure: Winner of Group A plays Runner-up of Group C, and so on. I wrote down the dates for the Quarter-Finals, the Semi-Finals, the Third-Place Match, and the Final. Again, all converted to my local watch time. I used bold text in my draft file to mark the converted times to make sure I didn’t screw them up later.
What I Ended Up With (and Why I Shared It)
The total time spent was maybe two and a half hours, most of it just cross-referencing to be absolutely sure that the match I wrote down for October 20th wasn’t actually on the 19th on a different page. It’s frustrating work, but now I have a single, clean list. No links to buy tickets, no confusing pop-ups, just the raw data you need to watch the game.
Here’s the structure I finally settled on, which is what I’m sharing with you guys today:
- Match Day: October [XX]
- Teams Playing: [Team X] vs [Team Y]
- Kick-Off Time (My Local Time): [XX:XX PM]
- Venue: [City]
It’s simple, right? But getting there was a chore.
You might ask why I bother sharing the process—why not just post the schedule and be done with it? Because finding this schedule, the real schedule, is a pain. This blog is about documenting my shortcuts and my struggles so you don’t have to face the same mess. I did the deep dive, I did the time zone math, and I put it all in one spot, from the opening whistle to the final trophy presentation.
Look, I’m just a guy who wants to watch a good soccer match without a spreadsheet full of time zone formulas. If my little project saves one parent, or one die-hard fan, from missing the start of a game, then the two hours I spent wrestling with the official sites were totally worth it. The information is out there, but sometimes you just have to grab it, wrangle it, and convert it yourself. Now go see when your favorite team plays!