69-Hour Soccer Match Breaks Guinness World Record, Ends with Score of 404-369

While soccer fans have been glued to the World Cup, another legendary match took place in France this week: A charity soccer game in Lyon that lasted 69 hours and included more than 800 players.

On July 1, Equal Playing Field, a non-profit initiative promoting women in sports, broke the Guinness World Record for the most players in a five-a-side match. Over the course of two-and-a-half days 807 players, including a number of professional athletes, took to the field at Groupama Olympique Lyonnais Academy.

The final score: 404-369, Team Blue beating Team Red.

According to Guinness, breaking the record required that each player spend a minimum of 10 minutes on the field and touch the ball at least once. But Some participants played for as long as seven hours, according to Equal Playing Field.

Pakistani soccer star Hajra Khan played for four hours and made six goals.

"I have always aimed to use my passion to inspire others," Khan told Pakistan's Express Tribune. "I have always wanted to turn my passion into an example to encourage those around me to pursue their goals."

She had an ulterior motive. "It's not about breaking world records and scoring goals," she told the Tribune in a separate interview. "It's about why I do it. For Pakistan—for inequality in sport."

The Pakistani National Women's Team last played in 2014, in the South Asian Football Federation championship in Islamabad. Since then, critics say, the Pakistan Football Federation has ignored women's sports. Khan says she's faced discrimination from the organization since 2017, when she asked for equal opportunities for the women's national soccer team.

For the past three years, Equal Playing Field has been working to promote opportunities for women and girls in sports, with an emphasis on marginalized countries. Mondays' record-breaking game was part of the organization's Festival of Football, which also included seminars, workshops and film screenings.

But it wasn't the first Guinness World Record that Equal Playing Field has broken: Last year, the group organized a match near the Dead Sea in Jordan that, at 1,070 feet below sea level, was the lowest-altitude soccer game ever. The year before, it staged a game on top of Mount Kilimanjaro, breaking the record for highest-altitude match.

This wasn't even the first record Equal Playing Field broke last weekend: An 11-player match held Sunday had the most players of different nationalities—54 countries were represented.

Khan has played in all of the record-breaking matches.

She told Images she's doing it "to get the next generation of girls to come out and play without any hesitance and resistance, where they will not have to worry about their rights or inequality."