Introduction to the AIFR

The Archive of International Football Results was founded with the aim of ultimately including the result of every men's senior "A" international match ever played. It has been assembled over a number of years starting from 1994, being first made available on the World Wide Web in 1996.

The A.I.F.R. was used by Vauxhall to provide statistical information on its World Cup 98.

The archive contains more than 20,000 entries, each of which is compressed into as small a space as possible. The resulting database is available to be searched by a suitable script.

The archive is accessed by means of a form which the user fills in and submits to a web server. The server then runs the script which conducts the search and returns the results.

The server, located at City University, is sometimes busy. Response times can be slower than one would ideally hope, although City University has recently taken steps to improve server availability.

There are bound to be omissions from the archive, most notably with regard to Asian and Central American/Caribbean matches. There are certain to be mistakes, either simple typing errors or errors arising from mistakes in the sources. Please help me to improve accuracy by reporting these when you come across them. The same applies to bugs in the program.

Software version

The A.I.F.R. depends on a number of routines, which have been completely rewritten for version 2. The current version numbers are:

• ifa: version 2.1, dated April 2001; this creates the database file in uniform format from a number of text files where data are interspersed with comments and descriptions of the structure of competitions.
• read_ifa: version 2.1, dated July 2001; this is the script which reads the database file, sorts the results according to the user's preferences and displays them as the user requires.