8 strange facts about soccer

1. The highest scoring soccer game was 149-0!

You’re probably wondering how a soccer team could be so bad that they let 149 goals be scored, but the truth is it was a form of protest. The event occurred in 2002 after a 2-2 draw between rival teams Stade Olympique de L’emyrne, or SOE, and AS Adema of Madagascar, which resulted in the referees awarding a penalty causing SOE to lose the game.

As a form of protest for being robbed of the title because of a penalty, the players purposefully scored 149 goals into their own net at the next game as spectators stormed the ticket booths demanding refunds. Besides being very confused at first, the opposing team eventually stood around in good humor at the planned stunt.
The result? Besides losing 149-0 and breaking the previous record from 1885 of 36-0, the SOE coach was suspended along with several of his players and captain.

2. Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho first gained media attention after he scored every goal in a 23-0 game at age 13.

Ronaldo de Assis Moreira, or Ronaldinho, is a Brazilian football (soccer) star who has twice won FIFA World Player of the Year. Ronaldinho was born in Porto Alegre as the son of a salesperson and shipyard worker.
His father had also played football, but had died of a heart attack when Ronaldinho was eight. When Ronaldinho’s older brother signed with a football team, the family moved to a more wealthy area. It was short lived, though, as his brother ended his career after an injury.
 When Ronaldinho was only 8, he also began to show skills in football. When he was 13, and scored 23 goals in a 23-0 victory against a local team. He was identified as a rising star at the 1997 U-17 World Championship, where he scored two goals from penalty kicks.

 3. A bolt of lightning killed an entire soccer team during a game in 1998!

In October of 1998 a bolt of lightning killed an entire 11-man soccer team from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The opposing team was completely unharmed. Thirty more people had burn injuries.
Some people thought the team had been cursed and that was what caused the lightning to strike them. The game was a draw at 1-1 when the lightning struck the visiting team in the province of Kasai in the eastern region of the DRC.

4. Barbados once had to score a goal on themselves in order to win a soccer match!

This happened in a late game of the Caribbean Cup tournament in 1994. It sounds really strange but there's a really good reason for why Barbados had to do this. They were playing Grenada, and they needed to win by 2 goals in order to make it through to the next round of the tournament.
Although they had led for 2-0 most of the game, Grenada scored a goal in the 71st minute. The 2-1 score would have meant Barbados would've gone out of the tournament. So what did they have to do?
Force a tie, and go to overtime. The overtime would be played under golden goal rules (the first to score, wins) and the golden goal was worth 2 goals. Therefore, Barbados had a better chance at getting through by tying the game and scoring the golden goal.
Grenada caught wind of what they were doing, and you had the funny situation in which Barbados was trying to score a goal on their own goal, and Barbados was trying to defend their opponent's goal! In the end Barbados scored the golden goal and went on to the next round of the tourney.
 What do you think, ingenious play or a cheap tactic?

5. In 1964 a referee's call during a soccer match in Peru caused a riot that killed over 300 people!

Another 500 people were injured in that riot in Lima, Peru. The match was a qualifier for the 1964 Olympics. The refs disallowed a goal for Peru, resulting in the riot.

There was an even worse soccer disaster in Moscow in 1982. A late goal resulted in a stampede. People who had tried to leave the game early rushed back to their seats, and 340 people were crushed.

6.A soccer player can run 10 km in one game! That's more than 6 miles!

In 2007, AC Milan's Gennaro Gattuso ran an estimated 10 km in one game against Manchester United. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) had been working on a system for calculating things like how far individual players run, and how far and fast the ball gets kicked by tracking them with multiple cameras. The system is accurate within a 3% margin of error.

To get an idea of how much running that is, 10 km is the equivalent of running across 350 basketball courts. Gattuso's numbers aren't all that unusual either. 10 km is actually pretty average.

Remarkably, most of that running is done WITHOUT THE BALL. The average player controls the ball for only 200 meters about 2% of the total distance they run. In addition, soccer players are sprinting for 800-1200 metres (roughly 1/2 to 3/4 of a mile). They also have to accelerate 40 to 60 different times in a game, and change direction every 5 seconds.

In a little more than 4 games, a soccer player will have completed the equivalent of a marathon.

7.Australia achieved the largest victory ever in an international soccer match when they defeated American Samoa 32-0 in 2001.

This came just a day after the Australians had broken the previous record by dominating Tonga by a score of 22-0 in the opening round of the 2002 World Cup qualifier! The previous goals record had been achieved by Kuwait a year prior in a 20-0 massacre of Bhutan.

Part of the reason the second Australian victory was so dramatic was because the American Samoans had to call in their junior squad because the senior team had a passport mixup (the juniors' average age was 18!). Archie Thompson of Australia also scored a record 13 goals in the match, beating the former World Cup record of 7, held by Iran's Karim Bagheri. Thompson had only scored one goal in two other appearances for his country before that point!

8. In 1966 the World Cup trophy was stolen and later found by a dog days before the tournament began.

The Jules Rimet trophy, which is made of solid gold and valued at 30,000 euro, was swiped while on display at Central Hall in Westminster, London. The trophy is named after a French lawyer who began the World Cup soccer tournament in 1929. The thieves also left behind postage stamps worth 3 million euro!

Several days after the thievery, a dog named Pickles found the cup in south London while on a walk with his owner! England ended up winning the tournament and the recovered trophy, but in 1970 Brazil was permitted to keep the trophy forever after winning their third title. Thirteen years later, the cup was stolen again in Rio de Janeiro - it has never been recovered.