Sports Reference Blog

Thanks to our new data deal with StatsPerform/Opta we are now able to display xG data for individual goals and assists on our player goal logs. Using this information you can now find out things like Lionel Messi had two 0.03 xG goals in the same match vs Alavés on February 13, 2021.

These goal logs are available for all competitions we cover and include xG for the full set of Opta leagues we added last month.

Entering the 2022 NFL season, the NFL Record and Fact Book (the official record book of the National Football League) listed Ben Roethlisberger as the all-time leader in 'Most Time Sacked, Career' (as it is listed in the guide) with 554. Tom Brady was listed second with 543. Above this list is the note 'Times Sacked has been compiled since 1963."

Subsequently, Brady made a bit of news when he recently passed Big Ben to become the 'all-time' leader in Times Sacked.

Entering the season, Pro-Football-Reference would have listed the same leaderboard as the Record and Fact Book, though our statistics for this category went back to only 1969. However, thanks to the expert research of T.J. Troup, and some consultation with the great John Turney, our updated all-time 'Times Sacked' leaderboard also has a new leader. But it's not Tom Brady. It is Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton. Read the rest of this entry

As part of our conversion to Opta, we are now able present shot-level xG within our match reports. All current and historical matches from our competitions with advanced data (xG Explained on FBref) will now have shot-level xG and post-shot xG presented within the shot summary.

For instance, here are all of the shots from the November 7th, Real Madrid-Rayo Vallecano match.

Full Match Report

We will continue to expand our use of xG on the site as we continue our partnership with StatsPerform Opta.

In our quest to show the most data possible, FBref has taken a major step forward this week. We have dramatically expanded our coverage of leagues and competitions with advanced stats.

In addition to our in-depth data for the Big Five Competitions (England, France, Germany, Italy & Spain), Champions League, Europa League, and MLS, we have added coverage of Women's Football for current seasons (and in some cases historical seasons) for:

• 🇺🇸 American NWSL
• 🏆 Women's Champions League
• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 English Super League
• 🇦🇺 Australian A-League
• 🇫🇷 French Division 1 Feminine
• 🇩🇪 German Frauen-Bundesliga
• 🇮🇹 Italian Serie A
• 🇪🇸 Spanish Liga F
• 🏆 Women's World Cup and Euros

But wait, there's more. On the Men's side we are adding more depth to our coverage including our first in-depth coverage of Latin American Football.

• 🇳🇱 Dutch Eredivisie
• 🇵🇹 Portuguese Primeira Liga
• 🇧🇷 Brazilian Serie A
• 🇲🇽 Mexican Liga MX
• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 English Championship
• 🏆 Conmebol Copa Libertadores
• 🏆 Men's World Cup, Euros and Copa America

Expanding access to data is a core value at Sports Reference, so we had to make changes to provide this level of coverage. We are pleased to announce that we are now a partner with Stats Perform Opta. Opta's data has replaced the previous data from StatsBomb on our site in all cases. This new partnership is the largest data deal we've ever signed and represents a huge commitment by FBref to advance access to Women's football data throughout the world. We are grateful for the long-term commitment that Stats Perform has made to us. And if you all flock to the site in the way we expect, this is just the start of the data we may present over the life of our partnership with Stats Perform.

Read the rest of this entry

We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause a handful of users, but we have decided to sunset our widget service effective January 1, 2023. We have only a few users utilizing this service and it is no longer cost effective for us to maintain this service.

On January 1, 2023, the widget service will just return a note that this service has been disabled.

On January 1, 2024, the service will start returning a server error.

Ashlie Rose joined Sports Reference Product team last week as our first dedicated User Experience Researcher. Ashlie has a BSc in Cognitive Science from UCSC. Born in Hawaii and raised in California, she resides in the Santa Cruz Mountains among the redwoods.

Our devops department finished our move from AWS's Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN) to Cloudflare's CDN this week. This will be undecipherable technical jargon to most of you, so I'll explain what it means.

When you request a page or file from the site, the request first goes to a CDN that is located geographically close to you and if a neighbor of yours (within several hundred miles) has requested the page earlier in the day, you'll get a cached copy of that page much faster than you would otherwise. If your neighbors are lame and don't use our site or just haven't visited that page, then the request will be passed on to our servers and we'll send you the page.

This has many advantages in that it takes a load off our servers and also makes things faster in general for our users the more the sites are used.

Cloudflare also includes bot filtering with this offering. It actively searches for badly behaved bots and proactively blocks them from our site. We are now utilizing this feature because we get scraped. A LOT. And if your bot is badly behaved then we don't want you impacting the performance of the site for our other users. We've gotten a number of emails around this this week as people who have been scraping us have found themselves blocked.

As of today, this filtering will remain in place for our:

• Soccer/Football
• Basketball
• Hockey
• College sites

We are turning off the active bot filtering on our baseball and pro football sites at this time. We will re-enable bot filtering the week after the end of their respective seasons.

What is a well-behaved bot? Please see our Data Use page and our Bot Traffic page for guidance. Note that if you are blocked by our servers, the blocks reset after 24 hours, so with some more polite settings on your bot you may be able to try again the next day.

We can not provide an API (per our data licensing agreements), and you should not view as a data provider (on par with SportRadar or Genius Sports). This is a role that we do not and can not support with company resources.

We're very excited to announce a new update to Stathead that incorporates a wide range of new advanced stats from Pro Football Reference. Previously, these stats were available on the season, team, and player pages of PFR, but now you can use the searching ability of Stathead to discover the answers to more questions using that data. Read the rest of this entry

We have some very exciting news to announce from our soccer site: FBref now has goal logs! The logs include detailed notes on the goal, including broad information like the opponent, scoreline, and competition, as well as more in-depth information when available like what minute they scored, the distance from the goal, the preceding action that set up the shot, and even the part of the body they used to take the shot. Read the rest of this entry

We're excited to announce a brand new tool on Stathead Football. It's called the Team Season Finder and, as you might guess, you can use it to look up team stats over a single season, a range of seasons, or the entire history of the NFL. Read the rest of this entry