By oldest 
Getting started with Israeli football stats
Woke up thinking “Israeli Premier League stuff might actually interest people”. Searched where to grab free stats first. Tried several football sites until one didn’t crash my browser after 30 seconds. Downloads came as messy CSV files naturally. Excel froze twice before I got anywhere.
Cleaning up this crap:
- Opened file in Notepad++ first – looked like alphabet soup threw up
- Had to manually delete 7 trash columns full of dashes and question marks
- Found three duplicate listings for Maccabi Tel Aviv like what the hell?
- Goals against column showed negative numbers – no clue how that happened
The comparison disaster zone
Wanted side-by-side tables showing home vs away performance. Pivot tables looked like a car crash – kept mixing up Maccabi Haifa and Maccabi Petah Tikva. Accidentally compared Hapoel Beer Sheva’s attack with Beitar Jerusalem’s yellow card stats. Took four coffee breaks.
Eventually sorta fixed it by:
- Making separate sheets for each garbage spreadsheet export
- Using VLOOKUP that returned errors half the time
- Manually typing stats for 3 teams when it all went sideways
The great visualization fail
Thought “hey let’s make shiny graphs”. Bar charts overlapped like drunk ants marching. Team names got chopped off after two letters. Color palette looked like unicorn vomit after PowerPoint auto-“helped”. Said screw it and made grayscale tables instead.
Final “analysis” if you can call it that
Spent three hours noticing Hapoel Tel Aviv concede 63% goals in second halves. Then realized I’d mixed up 2024 stats with 2023 data halfway through. Found three more errors while writing bullet points:
- Had Beitar Jerusalem marked as “relegated” when they’re actually 8th
- Gave Bnei Sakhnin extra losses from Purim holiday games
- Goalkeeper stats included some poor defender accidentally
Published the damn thing hoping nobody counts the mistakes. Got roasted in comments about Maccabi Netanya’s actual position. Moral? Double-check everything twelve times before hitting publish. Beer required after wrestling Israeli football data.
