Counting

[são paulo]

Hello
Can someone help me? I want to make an excel table for a tournament i'm organizing. the function which i'd like to know is the following:
in each column, i'd have the names of the players that have scored goals (each column would be one match). So I'd like to know a formula that would count how many times each player appears and give me a list of all of them.
Was I clear? If not, please ask and I'll try to explain again.
Thanks in advance

[davesexcel]

How about this
in B1 enter the name you want to count
enter this function in C1 or wherever this is just an example of how to count

=COUNTIF(A1:A9,B1)
A1:A9 is the range of names
B1 is the criteria