Alright so this Mexico vs Jamaica stats thing started when my buddy Carlos bet me Jamaica had more goals total. I figured nah, El Tri dominates that matchup easy. But then I couldn’t actually prove it right away, which bugged me.
Step 1 was just trying to google the answer like a normal person. Biggest mistake ever. Searched “Mexico Jamaica all time record” “Mexico Jamaica total goals history”. Every site showed some useless recent tournament crap or just gave head-to-head wins. No actual total goals listed anywhere! FIFA site? Ha! Good luck finding anything past last year on that maze.
Realized I had to do it the hard way. Decided to build my own spreadsheet from scratch. Started listing every dang match I could find since they first played. Major headache sources:
- ESPN archives: Only went back to like 2005, and half the pages wouldn’t load right.
- Football databases: Found one listing matches back to 1963! Perfect! Except… it kept crashing my Firefox. Like always. Had to switch to Chrome and even then, copied and pasted like 35 separate match pages worth of data.
- Old forum posts: Found some obscure soccer forum where this dude listed results from the 70s and 80s. Prayed he wasn’t messing with me. Copied that too.
Got the data, now the REAL pain started. Spent basically one whole Saturday night and half of Sunday morning:
- Putting every single match date into Excel. Formatting was a frickin’ mess. Some sources used day/month/year, others month/day/year, one weird one used year-month-day. Fixed it manually, line by line. Wanted to throw the laptop.
- Typing in the scores for each game. Mexico 2-1, Jamaica 0-0, Mexico 4-0… on and on and on. Eyes started crossing around match number 50. Lost track twice and had to re-check batches.
- Made separate columns for Mexico Goals and Jamaica Goals. Simple SUM formula? Should be easy, right? Of course not. Forgot to include like three matches from 2015. Formula wasn’t working, finally realized I typed Jamaica’s goals in Mexico’s column for those. Nearly screamed. Fixed it.
Finally, FINALLY, got my numbers. Highlighted those SUM cells in bright green like I won the lottery. Mexico total goals: Had it. Jamaica total goals: Had it. Goals per year? Used conditional formatting to make it look kinda cool, different colors for high/low scorers.
Carlos was blown away. Showed him the sheet. Proved Mexico does have more (way more!). But honestly? By the time I finished, I didn’t even care that much about who won the bet. Just felt crazy relieved to have the dang thing done. Spent way more hours than sane on this. Made the spreadsheet look halfway decent, threw in a simple chart showing goals per year trend. Overdone it as usual. Coffee helped. Might need stronger stuff next time I decide to dig into CONCACAF history.
