About

Sources and image credits

The sources behind the figures on World Cup 2030 Guide: FIFA, RSSSF and Wikipedia, what each one contributes, and the credits for the photographs used across the site.

Most figures on World Cup 2030 Guide rest on three sources: FIFA for official totals and dated articles, RSSSF for the match-by-match record of each final tournament, and Wikipedia for biographies, match pages and a second check. Figures taken from the site’s register of facts are marked in the text of each article and listed at its end with their status, their source and the date they were checked.

FIFA: official totals and dated articles

FIFA’s pages are the reference for official totals. Its all-time scorers list gives each leading scorer’s career total and his goals tournament by tournament. Its retrospective articles each look back at a match, a player or a tournament, and they are read with their publication date: when a later World Cup has overtaken a statement in one of them, the profile that cites it says so instead of repeating it.

RSSSF: the match-by-match record

The Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation (RSSSF) keeps a match-by-match record of each World Cup final tournament, with line-ups, scorers and goal minutes. Player profiles recount appearances and goals from these records, match by match, rather than copying a total from a summary. RSSSF sometimes places a goal a minute away from FIFA or Wikipedia; how those differences are settled is explained below.

Match details by tournament: 1954, 1958, 1962, 1966, 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2006. The RSSSF World Cup overview links to every edition.

Wikipedia: biographies, match pages and a second check

Wikipedia’s articles on players, tournaments, groups and single matches are read in their source form, the raw wikitext, so that a table is taken from its cells and not from a summary of it. They serve as a second check on RSSSF’s match details, and they supply background that the other two sources do not cover. A detail found in Wikipedia alone is attributed to it where it appears.

FIFA’s all-time scorers list is checked line by line against Wikipedia’s List of FIFA World Cup top goalscorers. The single-match scoring record rests on Wikipedia’s Oleg Salenko article rather than on a FIFA page. Each player profile links the biography, tournament, group and match articles it draws on.

When sources disagree

When two sources agree and a third differs, the profile follows the two and notes the difference. When they disagree and nothing settles it, the detail is left out: a goal is listed without its minute, and a claim found in a single source is either attributed to that source or dropped. A dated article is not quoted as current once a later tournament has changed what it says.

The full method is set out in How we verify. Errors are corrected as described in the editorial policy.

Image credits

The photographs shown on World Cup 2030 Guide come from Wikimedia Commons. Each is listed below with its author where known, its license and the changes made to it.

Image credits — 24 photographs from Wikimedia Commons

Photographs used on this site come from Wikimedia Commons and are reused under the licence shown for each. Public-domain images carry no condition; Creative Commons images require this attribution wherever they appear. Every image was cropped and resized for this site.

The preview images that appear when a page is shared on social networks or in messaging apps are made by the site itself, from the page’s own title and, where it has them, its key figures, set in the site’s typefaces. They contain no photographs. No image on the site is AI-generated or licensed from a stock library.