Okay, so I messed around with trying to get some Greek football cup data. Here’s how it went down.
First off, the idea: I was just chilling, watching some random sports clip, and I thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to dig into some obscure football league data?” Greece came to mind for no particular reason, so Greek Cup it was.
Where to find the stuff: This was the tricky part. I started with the usual suspects – ESPN, some sports data aggregators, that kinda thing. But the Greek Cup isn’t exactly prime-time material, you know? Ended up having to scrape a few random-looking football sites. They looked like they were built in ’98, but hey, they had the data.
Scraping Time: I used Python with Beautiful Soup and Requests. Old school, I know, but it gets the job done. I basically looped through the site’s tables, grabbing team names, scores, dates – the usual football stuff. It was messy. The HTML was all over the place, some dates were in Greek, some in English, it was a proper headache.
Data Cleaning Nightmare: This took forever. I had to write a bunch of custom functions to convert Greek month names to English, deal with inconsistent date formats, and correct misspellings of team names. Seriously, some of these sites were using abbreviations that I couldn’t even Google. Trial and error, my friend, trial and error.
Storing the data: I dumped everything into a CSV file. Simple, but effective. I could’ve used a database, but for this little project, a CSV was plenty. Plus, I’m lazy.
Analysing (a bit): I loaded the CSV into pandas (Python again). Did some basic stuff: which teams won the most, average goals per game, that sort of thing. Nothing earth-shattering, but it was cool to see some trends. Like, one team clearly dominates the cup every other year. Go figure.
The Lessons Learned:
- Web scraping is a pain, especially when the source is janky.
- Data cleaning is 80% of the job. Seriously.
- Pandas is your friend when you’re dealing with tabular data.
Would I do it again? Yeah, probably. It was a fun little project, and I learned a few things. Plus, now I know more about Greek football than I ever thought I would. Who knows, maybe I’ll try another obscure league next time. Lithuanian basketball, anyone?
