Sports Reference Blog

Happy New Year! FBref has already gotten far since we first launched in June, expanding to cover 20 major national competitions. The 20th addition is Croatia, as we now have 1. HNL (or First Football League) statistics back to the league's 2007-08 season. One of our major added features in 2018 was getting current-season statistics running, and we also have that for 1. HNL, where on the league's 2018-19 page you can see the current league table, as well as goal leaders, clean sheet leaders and most common nationalities in the league.

As we add more countries we also get to complete more players' professional beginnings, and Croatia is no exception. Luka Modrić has been a key piece of Real Madrid for years, and now we have his age-21 season with Dinamo Zagreb. Elsewhere, Mario Mandžukić won championships with Bayern Munich and Juventus, but before then he was part of three championship squads in Zagreb.

FBref will continue to grow in 2019, and you can keep up with the latest additions of country coverage and new features here on the Sports Reference Blog, or by signing up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

Our latest addition to FBref's statistical coverage is the Ukrainian Premier League, which the site tracks from the 2003-04 season, back when it was the Ukrainian Top League, up to the currently active season. Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kyiv's domestic dominance can now be properly dug into with this newly added coverage.

We continue to fill in the backstories of current Big Five players with country additions, and here with Ukraine we get to see West Ham United's Andriy Yarmolenko and his multiple double-digit goalscoring seasons with Dynamo Kyiv, as well as current Schalke 04 forward Yevhen Konoplyanka's time with Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. We will continue to announce new country additions on our Sports-Reference Blog, but you can also get availability updates directly to your inbox if you sign up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

Perhaps you've already noticed this, but beginning with the 2018-19 season Basketball Reference's current-season data is official NBA data as provided by SportRadar, which is the official statistics provider of the NBA. Our data has always been sound, but with our SportRadar partnership we will be able to apply statistical changes more seamlessly.

In the last few seasons, the NBA has decided to greatly increase the number of statistical corrections that they make in the days (sometimes weeks) after the completion of games. Thanks to this new partnership, these corrections will be applied to our site within 24 hours of these corrections being made. This applies to our box scores, our seasonal stats and to our play-by-plays.

We have added a new tool the Frivolities section of Basketball Reference: The Franchise Milestone Watch. This new tool will allow you to quickly select any active franchise and see if any players are approaching franchise records or are due to pass someone in the franchise record books. We are currently tracking most box score stats in this tool, with separate lists for the regular season and playoffs.

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All of our player pages on Sports-Reference have a newsfeed section where you can check up on player news and relevant blog posts that discuss the player. If you want your site to appear in those newsfeeds, you can follow the Add Your Blog Posts Here link next to every Player News section or click here to find instructions for the site you're interested in linking to.

We have now added this capability for FBref player pages as well, so if you're interested in appearing on FBref newsfeeds, you can read how to add the FBref Linker bookmarklet here. Once you've begun using the linker on your blog posts, contact us through our feedback form with the name of your site (at most 25 characters), the URL for your RSS feed (which must be a full text feed), a contact e-mail address and the URL of a page that uses the FBref linker.

We're happy for people to use FBref like their site's statistics partner, so if you help your readers find our content, we're glad to help our users find yours. If you have any other questions, you can also use the feedback form to get more information.

Poland has a long and storied history in the sport of football, and FBref has now added statistics from the country's highest tier, the Ekstraklasa. We have statistics for the top league back to the 2002-03 season, when the league was still known as I Liga Polska.

There are several Polish players that have extensive careers in the big five European leagues that we now have their Ekstraklasa beginnings for. Robert Lewandowski has been a top scorer in the Bundesliga for years, and now we have his two seasons as a teenager with Lech Poznań. Other players who've gotten early years filled out include West Ham United keeper Łukasz Fabiański and Genoa forward Krzysztof Piątek. Modern leaders in Ekstraklasa appearances Paweł Brożek and Łukasz Madej now have their careers covered as well.

We will continue to announce new country additions on our Sports-Reference Blog, but you can also get availability updates directly to your inbox if you sign up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

After Duke opened its season with a 118-84 win over Kentucky (ranked 2nd in the AP Poll at the time), we were curious when the last time was that a team had scored that many points on a team ranked so high. Our Matchup Finder tool allows you to search through results for all games between D-I opponents back to 1949-50 and includes rankings, but we realized you could sort by Margin of Victory, but not by Points Scored or Points Allowed. Well, we have good news: now you can.

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Another country that has been recently added to FBref's coverage is Turkey. Their top tier of football, the Süper Lig, now has statistics on our site back to the 2001-02 season. This helps fill out several profiles of players who started off in the Süper Lig before joining the major European leagues. Examples include current Everton forward Cenk Tosun, who won two Süper Lig championships with Beşiktaş, and Roma midfielder Cengiz Ünder, who spent a season with İstanbul Başakşehir. You can also dive into the careers of Süper Lig's veterans like Burak Yılmaz and Umut Bulut.

We will continue to announce new country additions on our Sports-Reference Blog, but you can also get availability updates directly to your inbox if you sign up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

Australia's top tier of football since 2005-06 is the A-League, and FBref now has statistics for all seasons in A-League history. With this, you can now take a look at prolific A-League players Alex Brosque and Bruno Fornaroli, as well as the professional career beginnings for Australians now playing in Euro leagues such as Matthew Leckie and Mile Jedinak.

With this, a reminder that we are also carrying daily updates for current seasons, including the 2018-19 A-League, which is 4 games in. We will continue to announce new country additions on our Sports-Reference Blog, but you can also get availability updates directly to your inbox if you sign up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.

FBref now has coverage of the Russian Premier League, the top tier of football in the nation of Russia. We have Russian stats back to the 2001 season, the final year when the top tier was branded as the Top League. You can look at the league stats for stalwarts on the international level such as Igor Akinfeev, who's been CSKA Moscow's main goalkeeper since 2003, as well as defender Yuri Zhirkov, who had a stint with Chelsea but most recently played for Zenit Saint Petersburg. We also now have more stats for 2014-2015's top league scorer Givanildo Vieira De Souza, more commonly known as Hulk.

We will continue to announce new country additions on our Sports-Reference Blog, but you can also get availability updates directly to your inbox if you sign up for FBref's mailing list. Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our feedback form or FBref's official Twitter account.