By history 
Man, today’s project was supposed to be simple: grab numbers from that FCB Femení vs Man City Women clash and lay it out clean. Figured it’d take an hour tops. What actually went down? A full afternoon wrestling with data. Story of my life.
Started With the Obvious Stuff
First thought: let’s check official sites. Big mistake. Barcelona’s stats page was slow like molasses. City’s? Had to click through five pages just to find basic possession numbers. Gave up after 10 minutes of spinning loading icons. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Falling Into the Spreadsheet Trap
Pivoted to old faithful – Excel. Manually typed possession percentages, shots on target, fouls. Halfway through entering yellow cards? Excel froze. Closed everything and lost 20 minutes of work. Swore at the screen. Opened Google Sheets like a sulky kid dragging feet.
Tried these steps:
- Made columns for each team (FCB / CITY)
- Dumped initial stats from memory (65% possession Barça, 89% pass accuracy)
- Google Sheets lagged when pasting Guardian’s minute-by-minute commentary
- Got distracted reading match drama instead of recording numbers
Total chaos.
The Automation Dream That Crashed
Figured I’d be smart – used this scraper tool collecting player heatmaps. Worked for five minutes pulling sweet xG data. Then bam! Python errors flooded the console.
- ModuleNotFoundError
- SSL certificate rejection
- API rate limit exceeded (no idea why)
Deleted three hours’ worth of half-baked scripts. Felt like smashing the keyboard.
Manual Grind Wins (Barely)
Gave up and mashed numbers from four different sources:
- Final stats from BBC Sport’s tiny match summary box
- Substitution times from UEFA’s terrible mobile site
- Shot locations pieced together from Getty Images captions
- Cross completion % found buried in a tweet thread
Manually rechecked every digit twice. My eyes still hurt from squinting at tiny fonts. Put everything in a basic table finally.
The Grand Finale (Messy Desktop Symphony)
Closed three browsers, twelve tabs, two crashed Excel windows and one terminal full of regrets. Final setup:
- Google Sheets with ugly merged cells
- Snipping tool screenshots of key metrics
- Handwritten sticky note saying “NEVER AGAIN (until next match)”
Posted the stats looking clean online. Nobody saw the seven coffee cups behind the scenes. What a headache.
