Starting my Guatemala Liga Nacional project
Woke up today craving fresh Liga Nacional standings after missing my Antigua GFC’s match last night. Thought it’d be quick to find but man was I wrong.
First tried checking regular sports sites on my phone. Either showed outdated tables or buried under endless ads. Scrolled through three different sites – all had different standings! Got so frustrated when I finally found one updated table only to see it locked behind a paywall.
Building my own solution
Decided enough is enough – made coffee and fired up my laptop. Remembered that trick with the web scraping tools my tech buddy showed me last month. Took some old grocery price comparison script and started tweaking it for soccer standings.
First attempt totally bombed – got team names mixed up with player stats. Fixed that mess by teaching the script to recognize specific table patterns. Next issue popped up when the site changed their layout overnight. Wasted like two hours rewriting selectors while yelling at my screen.
Making it user-friendly
Once I finally got clean data flowing, realized normal folks wouldn’t want to stare at ugly terminal outputs. Created a simple table display with:
- Club names
- Played matches counts
- Current points
- Form streaks
Tested it on my football WhatsApp group. My friend Carlos immediately spotted Malacateco’s position was wrong. Turned out I forgot to sort by points then goal difference! Fixed that bug while eating leftover pizza.
The finished product
Now hitting one button gives me instantly updated standings with actual kickoff times for the next matches. Still needs manual runs since I haven’t set up automatic scheduling yet. But hey, at least I can check if Municipal gained on us this week!
Best part? No more ads or premium account nonsense. Might clean this up and share the package with my local supporters club next week. They been complaining about this exact problem for months.