Iran premier league standings changes this week? Track top team movements!

Just wanted to share how I tracked this week’s wild changes in Iran’s football league standings. Started Tuesday morning craving updates but couldn’t find any site showing real-time ranking shifts. Total headache.

My Scraper Experiment

Grabbed my laptop and fired up Python since manual checking sucked. Wrote basic code pulling data from league’s official page – or tried to. Thing kept rejecting requests with errors. Felt like wrestling with concrete. Added some sleep timers between requests to pretend I’m human. Almost threw keyboard twice when it randomly blocked my IP.

Changed tactics entirely Wednesday night:

• Switched scraping tools after 3 hours of fighting Python
• Copied table elements manually when scripts failed – pure misery
• Dumped messy data into spreadsheet around 1AM smelling burnt coffee

The Painful Cleanup

Opened Excel Thursday looking like zombie. Data was spaghetti – some team names in Arabic script, points columns missing for newer clubs. Saw Esteghlal FC suddenly dropped points against Nassaji but tables showed wrong positions. Fixed cell by cell with bloody eyes. Took 17 failed exports before CSV worked right.

Realized final table looked suspicious. Esteghlal’s loss should’ve pushed Sepahan FC up – but nope. Rewatched match highlights only to discover ref awarded controversial late penalty. Stupid spreadsheet didn’t account for disciplinary points. Had to redo whole thing scraping FA decisions section.

Unexpected Discoveries

Persepolis actually gained advantage from other teams’ draws nobody reported. Mes Rafsanjan crept into top four quietly while everyone watched Persepolis – crazy stuff. My neighbor probably heard me yelling when last game’s result finally updated Saturday 3AM.

Whole process smelled like garbage fire honestly. Spent longer finding data than analyzing it. Might pay intern next time.