The World Cup Archive

Welcome to the football World Cup archive, which started out in summer 1998 as a contribution to RSSSF, a non-profit organization for collecting football statistics from all over the world. Below you find the intro file I wrote explaining the contents of the archive. And here are the possible errors that came up during the verification phase.

You can view the archive online, with details for finals of 1930 | 1934 | 1938 | 1950 | 1954 | 1958 | 1962 | 1966 | 1970 | 1974 | 1978 | 1982 | 1986 | 1990 | 1994 | 1998 | 2002 | 2006 | 2010 and 2014

You can also view full qualifying data here: 1934 | 1938 | 1950 | 1954 | 1958 | 1962 | 1966 | 1970 | 1974 | 1978 | 1982 | 1986 | 1990 | 1994 and 1998

These pages are prepared using a mixed encoding of ISO 8859-1 and ISO 8859-2 (for example Høgh and Výtlačil). If you see here junk instead of o-slash, y-acute and c-caron, your browser is either badly configured or just plain stupid (Netscape 4.x happens to be the latter, unfortunately).

I have prepared the full documentation of the World Cup since 1930, including the recent France '98 tournament, with the kind assistance of Karel Stokkermans, Misha Miladinovich, Søren Elbech, Jean Michel Cazal and other people who provided important corrections and details.

As a source I used the pages about WC history found at http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Sideline/8601/, which helped me a lot. This was checked against "Encyklopedia Pilkarska [Football Encyclopedia] FUJI", volumes 8, 11 and 9 (with respect to player names). ep FUJI is a series of volumes issued by the GiA printhouse from Katowice, Poland, which also produces excellent yearbooks. Unfortunately they don't have a web page or even an e-mail :(

I cannot assure that the data is 100% correct, so standard disclaimer applies. Particularly Brazillian and Iberoamerican names may differ sometimes from other sources, because in those countries names and surnames are handled differently than most Europeans are used to. Ditto for Arabian-speaking countries. Korean names are traditionally a nuisance to Europeans.

LEGAL NOTICE: The statistical information found in this archive is PUBLIC DOMAIN, as regulated by article 4 p. 4 of the Polish intellectual property law from 2nd Feb 1994. Other non-statistical information is subject to fair use as regulated by article 29 p. 1 of same.

The data format is as follows:

(date) (hour) (city, stadium)

(result)

(attendance) (referees)

(line-ups with substitutions)

(goals in order of scoring)

(bookings & sent offs)

(additional notes)

Some explanatory remarks:

Date: in dd/mm/yy format, year is two digits (this will not create problems until 2030).

Hour: local time when the match was scheduled to start (ie. for delayed matches see additional notes). European countries use generally GMT+1, with the exception of England and Spain (GMT). South American countries use GMT-5 or GMT-6, Mexico uses GMT-8 and USA uses GMT-5 to GMT-8 depending on place. Add/substract as needed to obtain the hour at which the match started in your country. You need to take DST into account as well, which makes converting older (pre-1960) times doubtful.

City, Stadium name: in local language if possible. However for Switzerland the versions generally accepted in English have been adopted.

Result: teams, result, half-result with additional data on extra-time (ie. the first result in parentheses is the one after 45 min, the second after 90 min, the third after 105 min). This could be simplified with the introduction of the golden goal rule. Also the result of penalty shootout if one occured (the British practice is to sum up goals from game and shootout when giving result, which is NOT encouraged).

Attendance: in many cases approximate. Various sources make different guesses, and reliable data just isn't available sometimes. Attendance has more than often been calculated on the basis of tickets sold, not by counting spectators.

The + sign before the number means "more than", - means "less than" and ~ means "around, approximately, more or less".

Referees: the first one is the main referee, the two following are linesmen. I have not included the technical referees who appeared at France '98, despite FIFA treating them as part of the traditional trio when presenting WC 98 stats on www.fifa.com.

Line ups: Captains are marked with (c). It was assumed that pre-war teams played 1-2-3-5, in the 50s this was changed to 1-3-2-5 (WM system), later to 1-2-4-4 (Brasil in 1962), 1-3-3-4, 1-4-3-3 and finally 1-4-4-2. Of course where there was evidence that a team used a different style that the one widely adopted at the time, this has been taken into account.

Goals: some sources may report the scorers differently, especially with respect to own goals. Minutes are +/- 1 due to the way some sources count them (ie. whether the first minute starts at kick-off or after 60 secs). The letters after minutes mean: p - penalty kick goal, f - free kick goal, h - header goal, o - own goal, c - corner goal. Penalties which were missed are also noted. "Out" in this context means also a crossbar or goalpost.

Bookings: list of names from both teams, separated by a / (slash). The list is ordered randomly and does not reflect actual booking order.

Additional notes: info on extraordinary occurances like a serious match delay, match called off (SWE-AUT in 1938), jubilee (centenary) matches and some other trivia. Also the method of calculating table positions was explained whenever it differed from the one now accepted at WC.

I've also included a list of all scorers in a given tournament, ordered alphabetically by country codes and then by player names. Own goals are listed separately. Below that is found a summary.

The list of coaches includes team coaches, assistants, managers, directors, selection commission members and similar (except for 1994 and 1998, where only main team coaches are given). The first person on the list is always the main coach. Reserve players are listed alphabetically. Note that until 1962 (?) there was no fixed 22-men limit on squads.

Youngest and oldest includes: players (with goalkeepers), goalkeepers, scorers, champions (from 1st team), finalists (from 1st-2nd team), medalists (from 1st-4th team), coaches (the main coaches, not the helping persons listed after them above) and referees. Due to problems with determining the dates of birth in the more exotic countries some data may be inexact or approximate.

About this document

Prepared and maintained by Gwidon S. Naskrent for the Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation

Author: Gwidon S. Naskrent (naskrent@free.net.pl)
Last updated: 17 Jul 2014