The most momentous World Cup

You might think the primary purpose of the World Cup is to determine which country has the best football team. You might think that, but you would be wrong. The purpose of the World Cup is to generate Great Moments that can stick in the mind longer than recollection of the winner of a particular match (or even tournament). On top of that they can, satisfyingly, be listed and ranked.

In this post I compile several such lists of Great World Cup Moments to find out which edition had the most of them and, therefore, was the best edition. I have used lists from the British media so we will see things from a point of view that places disproportionate value on moments involving British and Irish teams – apologies to the rest of the world – but I will show the result with them filtered out too.

The moments that appear in the lists are a motley crew of incidents and episodes. Some flashed by in less than a second, some were stories that developed over weeks or years. To bring some order to them, I have assigned each moment a type: some of the types are predictable like goal or match, others are more intriguing like violence or bodily fluids. The types are grouped into colour-coded categories. For example the goal, assist, trick and celebration types form the good category in green. You can see what make up the bad, ugly and other categories below.

For any given moment I’ve tried to focus on the aspect that made it memorable, rather than assign to it every type that could possibly apply. Some moments have two types, but none more than two. Of course the types and categories are subjective and could be defined and assigned in lots of different ways.

For each source list I have visualised its aggregate makeup of moments through the types and colour groups. If you want to know exactly which moments make up the lists you can skip ahead to the detailed table at the bottom of the post.

I’ve started with Channel 4’s 100 Greatest World Cup Moments. It’s a bit out of place because it’s over a decade old, but I’m including it because it’s a programme I rewatched several times after recording it from the television onto VHS. It was first broadcast in the run up to the 2002 World Cup so it features no moments from that tournament onward (but there is one from the 2002 qualifiers). The moments were ranked by public vote. Note that one moment, Pelé’s injury-hit 1962 and 1966 tournaments, is halved between two tournaments’ columns.

There isn’t a single moment from the first five World Cups. From there the number of moments increases as you move towards the present day, with three exceptions: 1966, 1970 and 1982 which all have more than the trend would predict. The 1982 World Cup wins with 14 moments; 15 if qualifiers are included. The 1990, 1994 and 1998 World Cups are all joint second with 13 moments each, also including qualifiers. Italia ’90 has a notably low number of momentous goals for such a recent tournament.

Moving on to more up-to-date lists, the BBC website brings us 100 great World Cup moments which was published in the build-up to Brazil 2014:

Each of the BBC’s moments is accompanied by a video, which will have counted against the earliest World Cups. Nonetheless we see, for the first time, a moment from Brazil 1950 and Switzerland 1954. Once again the winning World Cup is 1982.

The Independent published a list of the 100 greatest moments in the tournament’s history this May:

The 1982 and 1990 World Cups come out on top, as does 1994 if you include qualifiers. The 2002 World Cup does surprisingly well, being only one moment shy of the best World Cups. We have five moments from the ’30s but still none from 1934.

The Telegraph recently counted down the World Cup’s 50 greatest moments:

This list has a more even spread with five World Cups having five moments each.

The Guardian has been running through its 25 stunning World Cup moments. These were published as long articles rather than short descriptions and many take the form of stories rather than moments. I’ve done my best to streamline these in-depth pieces into one-word synopses:

The moments are very evenly distributed (it’s almost as if they did it on purpose) with no tournament having more than three moments and only one with zero (1958). Italy 1934 is finally represented. The tournaments with three moments are 1990 and, yes, 1982.

Now we have 188 unique moments that each appear in at least one of the lists, and here they are combined:

In a shocking development, 1982 has been pipped by 1990 by a single moment. USA ’94 and France ’98 take third and fourth. Yes, this isn’t fair on the 2002, 2006 and 2010 World Cups because they came too late to feature in the Channel 4 list, but those competitions are too recent to judge fairly anyway so let’s not worry about them too much.

Next I have resized the moments based on the number of lists they appear in, so a GOAL in all four lists is four times as tall as a GOAL in just the one list. The result is this monstrosity:

Now 1982 is the clear winner. I’m more than happy to take this interpretation of the data as the definitive one because 1982 is my personal favourite.

In the next chart, countries are ranked by the number of moments they contributed. In general a country is awarded a moment if they provide its most active participant, like the scorer of the goal, the perpetrator of the act of violence or the unfortunate man to commit the error. A few moments were made possible thanks to people from two nations, with neither more responsible than the other, so they have two countries listed against them.

England is the runaway winner, unsurprising given the nationality of the source newspapers and broadcasters. Interestingly 2010 champions Spain are active in only two moments in the entire history of the World Cup, and only one unrelated to their victory. The Dutch have the highest number of moments of teams that haven’t won the competition.

Next I tallied up moments by specific teams i.e. a country at a particular World Cup, like the 1966 England team or the 1982 Brazil team. The sides with three or more moments are:

England aside, the teams to have contributed the most moments are Brazil ’70 and Argentina ’86. Cameroon’s 1990 team is next with four moments, very impressive for a team that isn’t one of the World Cup’s traditional big names. Germany, while the fourth highest contributor of total moments, has not created more than two moments at any single tournament.

These are the World Cup’s most momentous players:

These country, team and player breakdowns throw the overall results somewhat into doubt. I always expected the lists to show a certain amount of local bias but ones where the England’s 1998 squad comes out as the second most noteworthy World Cup team ever, or where David Beckham is the competition’s all-time third most significant player, are clearly going over the top in domestic favouritism. As such, here is the full weighted list once more but this time with all moments excluded if their active team is England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales:

The 1982 World Cup survives the purge of moments to be crowned, once and for all, the best edition of the World Cup, even if a significant proportion of its ‘great’ moments show off the ugly side of the game.

Finally, here is the full list of the moments themselves: