Global Football: A Century and a Half in Charts
A visual tour through international results, goals, shootouts, and the nations that changed their names â compiled on September 29, 2025.
48,532
Total international matches
44,447
Recorded goals
653
Penalty shootouts
27
Current countries in former-names file
International Goals by Decade
From early friendlies to modern mega-tournaments, scoring has ebbed and flowed across eras.
Home vs Away: Who Wins More?
The home crowd still matters. Draws persist, but victory favors familiar turf.
Top 15 International Goalscorers (Dataset)
The most prolific finishers recorded in this collection. (Own goals excluded.)
How Goals Happen
Most goals arrive from open play, but penalties â and the occasional own goal â shape destinies.
Penalty Shootouts by Decade
The most nerve-shredding way to decide a match is more common in the modern game.
Nations and Their Former Names
Geopolitics and identity evolve. These countries have worn the most different names.
Biggest Winning Margins
Ten of the most lopsided scorelines on record.
| date | home_team | away_team | home_score | away_score | tournament | city | country |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001-04-11 | Australia | American Samoa | 31 | 0 | FIFA World Cup qualification | Coffs Harbour | Australia |
| 1971-09-13 | Tahiti | Cook Islands | 30 | 0 | South Pacific Games | Papeete | Tahiti |
| 1979-08-30 | Fiji | Kiribati | 24 | 0 | South Pacific Games | Nausori | Fiji |
| 2001-04-09 | Australia | Tonga | 22 | 0 | FIFA World Cup qualification | Coffs Harbour | Australia |
| 2005-03-11 | Guam | North Korea | 0 | 21 | EAFF Championship | Taipei | Taiwan |
| 1966-04-03 | Libya | Oman | 21 | 0 | Arab Cup | Baghdad | Iraq |
| 1987-12-15 | American Samoa | Papua New Guinea | 0 | 20 | South Pacific Games | NoumĂŠa | New Caledonia |
| 2000-02-14 | Kuwait | Bhutan | 20 | 0 | AFC Asian Cup qualification | Kuwait City | Kuwait |
| 2014-06-01 | Darfur | Padania | 0 | 20 | CONIFA World Football Cup | Ăstersund | Sweden |
| 2006-11-24 | Såpmi | Monaco | 21 | 1 | Viva World Cup | Hyères | France |
Highest-Scoring Matches
The games that turned into goal-fests.
| date | home_team | away_team | home_score | away_score | tournament | city | country |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001-04-11 | Australia | American Samoa | 31 | 0 | FIFA World Cup qualification | Coffs Harbour | Australia |
| 1971-09-13 | Tahiti | Cook Islands | 30 | 0 | South Pacific Games | Papeete | Tahiti |
| 1979-08-30 | Fiji | Kiribati | 24 | 0 | South Pacific Games | Nausori | Fiji |
| 2006-11-24 | Såpmi | Monaco | 21 | 1 | Viva World Cup | Hyères | France |
| 2001-04-09 | Australia | Tonga | 22 | 0 | FIFA World Cup qualification | Coffs Harbour | Australia |
| 2005-03-11 | Guam | North Korea | 0 | 21 | EAFF Championship | Taipei | Taiwan |
| 1966-04-03 | Libya | Oman | 21 | 0 | Arab Cup | Baghdad | Iraq |
| 1997-05-13 | Kazakhstan | Guam | 20 | 1 | East Asian Games | Busan | South Korea |
| 2000-02-14 | Kuwait | Bhutan | 20 | 0 | AFC Asian Cup qualification | Kuwait City | Kuwait |
| 2003-06-30 | Sark | Isle of Wight | 0 | 20 | Island Games | Saint Martin | Guernsey |
â˝ From Glasgow to Glory: A Storytelling Journey Through International Footballâs History
Introduction: A Game Without Borders
On a cold afternoon in November 1872, 4,000 spectators gathered at the West of Scotland Cricket Ground in Glasgow to witness something unprecedented. Scotland and England lined up for what would become recognized as the first official international football match. The game ended 0â0, and the crowd went home with no winner, but with history made. Nobody then could have predicted how this modest fixture would ignite a global phenomenon, captivating billions across continents.
Today, international football is far more than sport. Itâs theater, politics, memory, and identity â a stage where nations express pride, where underdogs dream, and where history is written in penalty shootouts and last-minute goals.
The data in front of us â spanning results, scorers, penalty shootouts, and even country name changes â tells not just of matches played, but of humanity itself. Letâs take a journey.
The Early Days: Rivalries Born
In those first decades, the story of international football was one of British Isles rivalries. Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland (later Northern Ireland) played fixtures almost yearly, drawing crowds who relished these contests as much as political debates.
By the early 1900s, the game spread beyond Britain. France, Belgium, and the Netherlands joined the fold. Soon after, South America picked up the torch â and with it, a new dimension of artistry was born.
Imagine July 1916 in Buenos Aires: Chile taking on Uruguay in South Americaâs first continental tournament, the Copa AmĂŠrica. That day, Isabelino GradĂn, a sprinter-turned-footballer, stunned defenders with two goals. The world of football had expanded.
Countries, Names, and Football Identities
As the former_names.csv reminds us, football history is tied deeply to geopolitics. Teams have taken the field under names that now exist only in memory.
- Dahomey became Benin (and their football identity shifted too).
- Upper Volta turned into Burkina Faso, whose national team â âLes Ătalonsâ (The Stallions) â became a continental powerhouse in Africa.
- Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, both carrying footballing legacies of the great AntonĂn Panenka, the man whose cheeky chipped penalty in 1976 changed shootouts forever.
When fans chant for their teams, they are often chanting for a new nationhood, for borders that have shifted, for identities redefined. Football fields have always doubled as theaters of politics.
The World Cup: A Stage Like No Other
Fast forward to 1930, Uruguay. The first FIFA World Cup. A celebration, a gamble, and a vision. Teams from Europe braved long ship journeys to compete. Uruguay, fresh from winning Olympic gold, lifted the inaugural trophy before a euphoric home crowd in Montevideo.
From there, the World Cup became footballâs greatest spectacle. Think of 1950, when tiny Uruguay silenced 200,000 Brazilian fans at the MaracanĂŁ. Or 1986, when Diego Maradona wove past five Englishmen to score the âGoal of the Century.â
The data shows how matches mushroomed in number post-WWII. By the 1970s, football was global â Africa and Asia demanded representation, and the underdogs began to bite. Cameroon in 1990, Senegal in 2002, South Korea in 2002 â each moment carried the echo of Glasgow 1872, but magnified a thousand times.
Goals, Heroes, and the Poetry of Scoring
The goalscorers.csv dataset reads like a global hymn book of footballâs legends.
- PelĂŠ in the 1950s and 60s, still the youngest World Cup scorer and winner.
- Miroslav Klose, quietly efficient, now the all-time top scorer in World Cups.
- Marta of Brazil, rewriting history in the womenâs game, scoring in five different tournaments.
But goals are not just numbers. Every one has a story:
- A last-minute header that rescues a nation.
- A penalty missed that haunts a generation.
- An own goal that turns a hero into a villain.
The dataset even tracks own goals and penalties, reminders that the sport is often decided by mistakes as much as brilliance.
The Drama of Penalty Shootouts
If regular time is a novel, then a penalty shootout is a Shakespearean tragedy compressed into minutes.
Our shootouts.csv holds tales of heartbreak:
- Italy vs Brazil in 1994, when Roberto Baggio blasted over the bar.
- Englandâs long, painful history of shootout defeats, a narrative finally broken at Euro 2020.
- Ghana in 2010, missing a penalty in the final seconds of extra time against Uruguay, then falling in the shootout â a moment that still haunts African football.
Shootouts distill the essence of football: pressure, psychology, luck, and courage. They create heroes â and ghosts.
Football as Cultural Mirror
Football has always mirrored culture and conflict.
When West Germany met East Germany in 1974, it wasnât just a World Cup group match; it was a Cold War statement. When Ivory Coastâs national team qualified for the 2006 World Cup, their success helped broker a temporary ceasefire in their civil war.
Even the changing names of nations in our dataset speak to how football carries memory: Czechoslovakia no longer exists, but their 1976 European Championship victory still echoes. Yugoslavia may be gone, but Croatiaâs run to the 2018 World Cup final was rooted in that shared history.
Patterns in the Data: What the Numbers Whisper
Beyond the drama, the data reveals fascinating patterns:
- Home advantage matters. Across 150 years of results, home teams win far more often â boosted by the roar of familiar fans.
- Goals per game have fluctuated. Early matches often had high scores (England 9â2 Scotland, 1901), while modern football is more tactical, leading to tighter results.
- Penalty shootouts are increasing. As tournaments expanded and defenses grew disciplined, knockout games more often go the distance.
Even in storytelling, the numbers remind us: football is constantly evolving.
Football, Memory, and Legacy
What keeps football alive isnât just the scores; itâs the memories. The child in Dakar who remembers Papa Bouba Diopâs goal against France in 2002. The teenager in Tokyo who cried with joy when Japan reached the Round of 16. The families in Rio who still tell tales of PelĂŠâs hat-tricks.
The dataset is a map of those memories. Every row â a date, a city, a scoreline â is a capsule of joy or sorrow, triumph or despair.
Conclusion: Why This Story Matters
From Glasgow 1872 to Qatar 2022, from Isabelino GradĂnâs goals in Buenos Aires to Lionel Messi lifting the World Cup, international football has been a global story without end.
The results, the goals, the penalties, the former names â they are all pieces of a mosaic showing us something bigger: that football is about humanity itself. Nations rise, fall, and change names. Heroes are made and broken. But the game endures, stitching us together across borders.
And when the next whistle blows, in some city somewhere, a new story will be written â one that might just enter the dataset, and our hearts, forever.
đ