Sports Reference Blog

Thanks to our friends at SportsOddsHistory, we've added NFL point spread data that is 100% complete back to 1969 and nearly complete back to 1952*. This data includes AFL games and allows us to expand our point spread searches in the Stathead Team Game Finder all the way back to 1952.

This new data produces some of the largest point spreads we've seen in NFL games. The largest regular season point spread in our dB is now November 13, 1966 when the Baltimore Colts were favored by 28 over the Atlanta Falcons (they did not cover).

The 1960s also included a pair of 20-point dogs that won outright (Vikings over Packers in 1967 and Dolphins over Oilers in 1966).

Additionally, we have added point spread data for a smattering of games between 1941 and 1951, including every championship game (including AAFC) from 1941-51. However, these pre-1952 games are not searchable in Stathead and will just be presented in the box scores for now.

We'd also like to add that while this data expansion gives us point spreads back to 1952, our over/under data is still only complete back to 1978 (except for Super Bowls).

*The data is nearly complete (as opposed to fully complete), because we are missing lines for the following number of games: 1968 (4), 1967 (1), 1965 (2), 1964 (3), 1963 (4), 1962 (3), 1961 (2), 1960 (4), 1953 (2), 1952 (9).

Below is a list of these missing point spreads:

Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to our new data deal with Opta, we are now able to present xG and post-shot xG on our goal log pages for clubs and countries (look for it during the world cup). This data shows you the details of each of goal including the scorer, the body part used, xG, post-shot xG, any assist and the two players with goal creating actions prior to the goal.

We have the same information for goals allowed which allows you to see that both of the goals scored against Manchester City in the Champions League group stage were headers.

See our xG explainer for the full list of 120+ league seasons we've added this info for.

Just wanted to provide a quick heads up on a subtle change to Basketball-Reference. We have changed the name presentation for several dozen for ABA players to more accurately reflect what they were known as during their playing days, rather than their more formal names. Their formal full names will still appear on their pages (and turn up in search), but the main name we use for presenting the following players has been updated. These names were formerly merely listed as nicknames: Read the rest of this entry

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.