Fjelstul Worldcup R Package [repack] š Fully Tested
And then, quietly, something shifted. FIFA itself started referencing the package in internal memos. Not officiallyāthey'd never admit it. But when they launched their own "enhanced stats" API in 2022, the field names matched Joshua's. event_id . minute_regulation . is_own_goal .
The data frame matches became legendary. Then cards . Then goals . Then substitutions . Then penalty_shootouts . Each one a layer of geological time, preserving the sediment of football history: Miroslav Klose's 16 goals, the phantom "goal" of 1966, the 2002 South Korea run that statisticians still argue about. fjelstul worldcup r package
It was 3:00 AM in Oslo, but Joshua Fjelstul wasn't sleeping. He was staring at a spreadsheet that had grown like a cancerous vine across his screen: 52 columns wide, 70,000 rows deep. It was the complete history of every foul, every offside call, every yellow card, and every substituted player in every FIFA World Cup match since 1930. And then, quietly, something shifted
Not for fame. Not for money. He built it the way a medieval monk illuminated a manuscript: one obsessively cleaned observation at a time. He wrote R scripts that scraped Wikipedia tables, then cross-referenced them with RSSSF archives, then manually corrected the mismatches. When he found that the 1934 Italy-Spain replay match had different substitution rules than the first match, he didn't rage-quit. He added a substitution_rule column. But when they launched their own "enhanced stats"
Most people would call this madness. Joshua called it .
install.packages("fjelstul") library(fjelstul) worldcup::matches %>% filter(tournament == "2022") %>% count(winner) Her screen filled with rows. Not just winnersābut every pass, every foul, every heartbeat of the tournament. She didn't see a package. She saw a cathedral built by one person's stubborn refusal to let history vanish into PDFs.