By colorado 
Why I Even Started This Mess
So last Saturday I woke up craving soccer stats like coffee. Saw Pumas UNAM versus Vancouver Whitecaps FC coming up and thought, “Heck, let’s make a player form guide!” Figured it’d take maybe an hour. Yeah, rookie mistake.
The First Disaster
Opened my laptop at 10 AM thinking I’d just grab recent performance stats. Went straight to Pumas’ official site. Big shock – their last three match reports had different stats categories each time. One showed pass accuracy, the next just fouls, the third listed possession but hid defensive stats. Like they used three different interns to write em.
Pulled up Vancouver’s site next. Worse. Injury reports from two weeks ago still tagged players as “day-to-day” with zero updates. Ended up crawling through five different fan forums just to confirm who actually played last week.
Spreadsheet Nightmare
Dumped everything into Excel around noon. Color-coded cells green for good form, red for poor. Looked like a Christmas disaster after five minutes:
- Pumas striker kept showing red for “shots on target” but green for “pressures” – dude couldn’t finish but ran like crazy
- Whitecaps midfielder had all yellows because stats sites disagreed on his position – one called him attacking, one defensive
- Realized halfway through I forgot to note who’d switched teams mid-season
Got so frustrated I almost threw my coffee at the screen when Excel crashed at 3 PM.
The Social Media Rabbit Hole
Went hunting for recent fan tweets about players. Big mistake. Found 200 posts about some Vancouver defender’s new tattoo – zero about his actual defending. Saw fourteen arguments about whether Pumas’ keeper looked “tired” in training photos. Gave up after finding a meme comparing Whitecaps’ coach to a potato.
Final Touches & Regrets
Finally slapped together the guide at 8 PM by making judgment calls. Marked three players as “wildcards” with question marks because the data contradicted itself. Published it online with a disclaimer: “This took 10 hours and my sanity.”
Three people commented that same night saying I was completely wrong about a midfielder’s fitness. Checked again – turns out he’d played for youth team reserves last week, not the main squad. Coulda sworn I checked that. Deleted the whole section.
Moral of the story? Next time I’m just watching the game with beer instead. Analytics shoudn’t require detective work.