Last October, when we converted over from StatsBomb to Stats Perform Opta data one of the stats that we had to stop carrying on the site was Progressive Carries. Thanks to help from Michael Caley of the Double Pivot Podcast, we are pleased to reintroduce Progressive Carries to the site. Given our expanded data coverage from Opta, we now have this stat for over 20 competitions (for both current and historical seasons) including most of the top women's football leagues.

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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.

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.

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.

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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 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 thrilled to present player wage data from Capology for the Big 5 men's European soccer leagues and MLS. We'd like to share a few notes on this data:
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US Soccer Fans, we have some exciting news! We've added historic draft data for both MLS and the NWSL. The data set includes every draft pick in the history of both leagues, so back to 2013 for the NWSL and back to 1996 for MLS. This update is thanks to the work of former data intern Eric Tran, who put together this data set for us, and current engineering intern Joe Zobel, who implemented it on the site.

Like other major American sports, and unlike the major European soccer leagues, the NWSL and MLS have an annual draft. Notable #1 overall picks include USWNT superstars Rose Lavelle and Crystal Dunn, current Leeds United midfielder Jack Harrison, and Andre Blake, #1 for the current MLS leaders Philadelphia Union. You can also explore other fun historical tidbits, like seeing current Leeds manager Jesse Marsch was selected 21st overall in the inaugural MLS draft,

Since the start of the year, Sports Reference has promoted three team members into director roles.

Jaclyn Mahoney, Director of Operations and Strategic Planning, leads our work on internal operations including our policies, procedures and our strategic planning. She started with SR as a data developer in early 2018.

Adam Darowski, Product Director, will lead Sports Reference's product development and product team. Adam was previously our Head of User Experience joining SR in late 2020.

Mike Lynch, Data Director, will lead Sports Reference's data work. He will lead both our internal data team and also independent contractors and our data vendors. Mike was previously our Stathead product manager. He joined SR in 2014.