The 1994 summer ran in the United States: 52 matches lifting average attendance to 68,991, the Rose Bowl deciding a final by penalty shootout for the first time, a suspension rewriting one group table, and a 6-1 elsewhere leaving the only five-goal single match in World Cup history. BallFact wrote that summer as 10 sealed files — 4 cases and 6 player dossiers. This page only aggregates and navigates: it adds no new external fact, and every sentence on it points back to content already written in the 10 files below.
Some World Cups belong to the winners; others to numbers that appear once a year. America 1994 supplies both: an attendance record of 68,991 a match that nobody has since approached, the first final ever decided by penalties at the Rose Bowl, one group table that had to separate three level teams — and a 6-1 in which five goals belonged to one name.
BallFact wrote that summer as 10 files: 4 cases and 6 player dossiers. Each stands on its own page with its own source list and confidence grading; this page does not restate their evidence. It does one thing: lays them back on one table so you can walk the whole line at once.
Read it as a map, not as content: every figure and judgement below, clicked, leads to a sealed file that vouches for it.
This is not a new case, nor a new dossier. It is an aggregation hub: once these files point at one another in fact (the same tournament, the same stadium, several names inside one goal-by-goal ledger), an entrance is warranted — one that gathers accounts spread over 10 pages into a walkable line.
5 threads run through the cluster: The gate's accounts (1 file) — Case 008 checks match by match against the official reports; the average gate is the denominator under every other figure here; The final's accounts (1 file) — Case 009 puts "one missed penalty lost the World Cup" back beside the kick-by-kick record; The turning point (1 file) — Case 013 tries "ban him and Argentina falls apart", and leaves behind a goal-by-goal ledger; The names (5 files) — The scorers written into that ledger and the authors beside them — who scored, and under whose name; The shape of the ledger (2 files) — Files that keep no match report at all, only a ledger: which row holds the peak, which row holds the break.
There is a line inside the cluster worth naming: the first half (the cases) deals with what people say — a received verdict, a remembered kick, a match retold as one man's show. The second half (the dossiers) deals with what the ledger writes — which row holds the peak, which row holds the break. We place them together precisely because the gap between saying and booking is the theme of this 1994 cluster.
A summer needs no more stories. It needs a table flat enough to lay the accounts on.
52 matches, 3,587,538 in total, 68,991 a game — line by line against the official FIFA reports; the closest later tournament still falls short. Verdict: confirmed.
94,194 at the Rose Bowl, the first final ever decided by penalties; 5 of Italy's 8 tournament goals his. Verdict: myth busted.
3.00 points a game with him, 0.00 without — yet Argentina had already qualified before kick-off. The same Group D ledger also takes "a Yekini hat-trick" apart into three names. Verdict: confirmed, with a wording correction.
All 18 Group D goals taken apart and recounted: 12 different names, and three teams level on 6 points who each scored 6 with 3, 4 and 5 different scorers. The group's only hat-trick is Batistuta's. Verdict: myth busted (attribution layer).
The only five-goal single match in World Cup history (Russia 6-1 Cameroon), plus the 1989 U20 golden boot — two FIFA tournament scoring titles in one man.
The second of that match's three scorers (43'). Our count: Nigeria's 6 group goals belong to 5 names, his 2 the squad high — and his ledger peaks a year before the World Cup.
The third name (55'). Five consecutive rows on one overall figure, while the table's priciest cells sit only on the 1994 and 1996 national rows — the mirror image of the file above.
In the same Group D ledger, Bulgaria's 6 group goals carry 4 names and his is not among them — this archive files no appearances and makes no claim about them. His ledger puts the sole peak of 85 and the finishing summit of 92 at Porto in 1993/94; the 1994 row reads 81, exactly his first row of 1988/89.
This ledger cannot produce a "best year": the unique summits of overall 84, finishing 90 and hunger 93 sit on the 1994 national row, while the unique summits of big-game, composure and vision — plus the only off-the-ball dip in seven rows — sit on the 1993/94 AC Milan row; the mark column stamps three peaks. Two published ledgers mention Romania and credit neither goal to him.
Seven rows; the overall summit of 82 is shared by 1993/94 and 1994. The break is not in the final year — durability drops from 80 to 50 (30 points) on the row straight after the peak, then 46, 34. The table high of 88 appears in 8 cells, 7 of them in a column this scale excludes from the overall. This file carries no match facts at all.
This is an aggregation page: all 10 cards point to published on-site files, and every figure on a card is taken from its own page.
BONG WENG
The Archivist
1994 is the most-cited year in this archive: 4 of our cases sit here, and so do the gate-by-gate and goal-by-goal ledgers of that group. Readers keep arriving at the same year through different doors without seeing each other — and that absence is itself a missing entrance.
So this page opens under the hard rule we set for hubs: a hub may carry no fact of its own. It must not "slip in" a sentence verified nowhere, or an aggregation page becomes the most dangerous single point of fabrication on the site, because readers assume 10 files stand behind it while that sentence stands behind none. The rule is held by the script: every distinctive figure or claim this page cites must be findable word-for-word on the page it points to, or generation aborts.
One side effect is worth filing: the membership of this cluster is computed from publication status. Pages still in draft are neither counted nor linked; once signed, re-running the generator lets the card list, the reading line and the numeral in the title renumber themselves. The count is not copied — it is counted. That is the standard we hold a navigation page to. The one editorial judgement here — "the gap between saying and booking" — is taken from each page's own verdict and shape sections, all of which are machine-checked against the database.
The best a navigation page can do is disappear: after reading it, what you should do is click into any of the 10 files — and then forget this page ever existed.
Note: this page carries no fact of its own — it is only the meeting point of 10 published files. Every figure and judgement points back to its source file and its own source list; the verdicts (confirmed / myth busted / confirmed-with-correction, and each dossier's L1–L3 grading) are signed on those pages and are neither rewritten, merged nor tightened here.
The map is not the territory. Click through — the archive is there.