By arlington 
So last night I was sitting on the couch thinking about Man United’s next match against Bournemouth. Wanted to see where both teams stood in the league before kickoff. Figured it’d be handy to pull up their positions side by side.
First try: manual search
Grabbed my phone and opened the Premier League app. Scrolled through that tiny table squinting at team names. Found Bournemouth around 10th place but then lost track scrolling for Man United. Accidentally tapped an ad for betting sites three times! Closed it in frustration.
Switched to laptop
Typed “Premier League table” into Google. First result was a news site with massive pop-ups. Second result had the table but needed endless scrolling. Decided to use browser tools instead:
- Pasted table selector into console
- Filtered teams with javascript
- Got just two rows with positions
But the stats were missing goals scored and recent form. Useless.
Built ugly solution
Opened Python and wrote this scraper:
- Imported requests and BeautifulSoup
- Fed in table URL
- Looped through all 20 teams
- Grabbed Man United + Bournemouth data
Printed out a mini-table showing both teams with games played, points, goal difference, last 5 results. Took 15 minutes including 3 fails where I messed up the HTML tags.
Final check
Ran script before breakfast. Saw Bournemouth sitting above United with better goal difference! Made mental note about their awful form last month. Now I know exactly what’s at stake when they clash.
Left the script running on my old tablet behind the coffee machine. One click shows the story now.