Sports Reference Blog

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.

The change from StatsBomb to Opta has necessitated some changes. We will lose some valuable stats like pressures, passing foot, pass targets, nutmegs, and StatsBomb's version of xG. However, in addition to the ability to add advanced coverage for many more leagues, we are also gaining the freedom to expand our use of visualizations, the creation of an FBref Stathead, and other improvements. For instance, you'll notice we now have shot-level xG listed on our player shot logs and match reports. Also, please keep in mind that the services that provide data like this are using humans to track the data and they develop their models separately, so there may be small variations in all of the data like passing or xG values as we make this switch.

Our xG calculations still use possession-based xG to calculate team totals. This means that a series of shots resulting from rebounds or the same series of plays can not result in more than 1.00 xG for the team or an individual player. Also, in order to handle the additional men's leagues we now use two peer groups for our scouting reports. Our xG explainer and Scouting Report explainer describe all of this in greater detail.

I'd like to thank Ted Knutson and StatsBomb for their partnership for the last three years. They took a chance on working with a small site just getting started, and we appreciate it immensely. If would like access to StatsBomb data, you should reach out to them through their website.

Finally, a big thanks to our team for getting this out the door. Dan, Jay, Andrew, Jonah, Adam, Adela and others were all heavily involved. Data Democratization is an important company value, and we are very excited to have worked with Opta to push the availability of women's football data as far forward as we have with this update.

NOTES

Given Opta's xA stat, we are changing our previous xA (which is expected goals for shots the player assisted) to be xAG, which can read as "expected assisted goals". Opta's xA will appear in our passing tables for now.

We can not contractually mix data from both providers, so we are not going to be showing competing xG numbers and have removed all StatsBomb data from our site.

Data Changes

Data Removed

passes_pressure, passes_by_foot, passes_by_body_part, passes_by_height, passes_by_specific_result, pass_targets
nutmegs
players_dribbled_past
carries, carries_completed, carry_distance, carry_progressive_distance, progressive_carries, carries_into_penalty_area, carries_into_final_third,
blocked_shots_saves, blocked_carries
pressures, pressures_def_3rd, pressures_mid_3rd, pressures_att_3rd, pressure_regains

Data Added

xA from Opta
(this may change as we start working with this data more)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 25th, 2022 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Advanced Stats, Announcement, expire120d, FBref, Features, Stathead, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.