Well, the 1/8 finals (the round of 16? what kind of a lame name is that?) is now behind us and the quarter-finals are looming ahead. After the first fucking boring and horrible not-so-good day of the 1/8 finals we were fully compensated by the two days that followed. And especially by Italy’s marvelous win over the evil Sith empire from Spain. What a revenge for the past two Euros! Continue reading
In case you didn’t hear, and I doubt there’s a football fan who didn’t hear about it, Cristiano Ronaldo scored a brace yesterday in Real Madrid’s Champions League win over Malmö, which brought the total amount of goals he scored for Real Madrid to 323, just like Raul, Real’s legen-wait-for-it-dary all-time leading scorer. Well, now there are two all-time leading scorers, and Cristiano will obviously claim the #1 spot all to himself in a few days. Continue reading
I’m starting a new thing today – posts that won’t be sports-related (although this one is. Dammit, Michael – be consistent!). I wanted to do this for a long time, and I even warned about it in the “About Me” section. For example, I do want to write sometimes about some of my favorite songs. So, the blog is still dedicated to sports statistics, but yeah, sometimes I will post some other things. Continue reading
Ok, so we’ve seen in Part I how we came to have the amazing record of 109 international goals we have now. And while it’s preposterous to think that some present day player might break it, I do want to mention some recent amazing goalscorers and to single out the few that may climb high enough to see Ali Daei’s back.
So, without Freddy Adu, let’s go:
The first amazing goalscorer chronologically is John Stern. Wait, who?! Michael, you made this one up, didn’t you? Continue reading
From Wikipedia: “Annus mirabilis is a Latin phrase that means wonderful year, “year of wonders” or “year of miracles”.” This is a term more often used for Isaac Newton’s amazing 1666 year, or Albert Einstein’s astonishing 1905 year. But yeah, we can definitely apply it to football as well. After all, “Football is not a matter of life and death… it’s much more important than that” – Bill Shankley.
Growing up as a sports fan and sports stats fanatic, I couldn’t not notice that there seemed to be these magical cohorts in sports. These wonderful years, in which a disproportional number of great athletes were born. Like the magical 1963 in basketball, a year which gave the world (let’s take a deep breath) – Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Chris Mullin, Hakeem Olajuwon, Joe Dumars, and those are just the major stars. One can also mention Charles Oakley, Detlef Schrempf and Spud Webb.
It seems un-fucking-believable that all of those players were born in the same year, within 12 months of each other. I mean, one can produce an all-time great team just based on this cohort alone. A starting five of Hakeem, Malone, Sir Charles, Michael and Dumars/Mullin – are you fucking kidding me?! Is there any other year that can compete with that?! Continue reading
Goals scored in a calendar year were never really important, until Messi made everyone count them in 2012. Since then, people all of a sudden became very interested in this kind of statistic, and now whenever a calendar year ends – we get the stats of how many goals in the last calendar year scored the leading scorers in the world. Continue reading
So… previously, on the third best sports blog in the world: we surveyed the all-time international caps record, its history, and two potential candidates to break it – Iker Casillas and Landon Donovan. This time we’ll have a look at some younger candidates, all of whom are very famous footballers, and who all accumulated a whole load of international appearances at a very young age. Let the fun begin! Continue reading
A short one this time, and totally not stats-related.
I watched “Taken” a few days ago, and I couldn’t not notice that Liam Neeson looks EXACTLY like Lionel Messi, about 25 years from now…
And I took a photo with my cellphone to prove it:
It’s a meme, it doesn’t need a caption!
Ok, well, I don’t really hate them. I don’t think you can be a real football fan if you hate them. For example, some aspects of Ronaldo’s character do get on my nerves from time to time, but I can’t stay ignorant of the fact that the dude is a footballer of a historic caliber, and I feel really grateful that I had the opportunity to follow his whole career.
But still, having said that, I do hate them in a way. Or actually, I hate their truly mind-fucking goalscoring numbers, which really changed the way we look at other players, past and present.
One of the many fetishes that I have is browsing through Wikipedia and looking at the statistics of different footballers. Wiki is a truly great site, and it has much stats-related information. I love looking at the tables with all the appearances and goalscoring data, and in several cases they also have assists data. Unfortunately, in Messi’s case – they don’t :-(.
Michael's Sports Statistics 