Most people would call this madness. Joshua called it .

Not for fame. Not for money. He built it the way a medieval monk illuminated a manuscript: one obsessively cleaned observation at a time. He wrote R scripts that scraped Wikipedia tables, then cross-referenced them with RSSSF archives, then manually corrected the mismatches. When he found that the 1934 Italy-Spain replay match had different substitution rules than the first match, he didn't rage-quit. He added a substitution_rule column.

A journalist used fjelstul to prove that red cards were 40% more likely in knockout matches when the referee was from a nation with a colonial history over one of the teams. A high school teacher in Brazil taught probability using the distribution of hat-tricks. A data artist made a sonification of every World Cup goal—each country assigned a musical note, each tournament a movement.

He didn't sue. He didn't tweet. He just updated the package to version 2.0.0, adding a new dataset: officiating_decisions_with_context .