10 ms·

Open Football Data

157 points by vinhnx 12y ago

ntietz 12y ago
This is really cool! Does anyone know if there are similar datasets for other sports out there? Even less clean datasets, as long as they have permissive licensing to allow sanitation and republication.
- isuraed 12y ago
  I believe ESPN has NBA play by play data.
  - ugexe 12y ago
    ESPN is not going to license or allow you republication rights to their data. ESPN data is also extremely difficult to sanitize (play by play does not match up with box scores, is just plain wrong, different formats, terrible html).
    - knowaveragejoe 12y ago
      Which is really a shame since their app offerings are awful.
    - grayclhn 12y ago
      This, this, this. I used their (american) football data for a hobby project and it would take 30 minutes to an hour to clean one week's worth of games. Hypothetically, I found the sporting news to have much cleaner data.
- cwyers 12y ago
  The gold standard for freely-available sports data is baseball, with the Retrosheet project: http://retrosheet.org/ http://retrosheet.org/ The license on the data is a pretty permissive one, simply requiring attribution of the data to the Retrosheet project. Software to process Retrosheet files is available, under the GPL: http://chadwick.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html http://chadwick.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html
  - bnycum 12y ago
    I'll add this. Sean Lahman's Database is also widely used. Though it's mainly whole season statistics, not game by game. Along with post-season, all star games, schools, salaries. http://www.seanlahman.com/baseball-archive/statistics/ http://www.seanlahman.com/baseball-archive/statistics/ Then of course MLB has a bunch of data here, mainly the PitchF/X data since 2008 is gathered from here. http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/ http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/
    - cwyers 12y ago
      There's several scrapers to parse the MLB XML data, the most popular (I think) is Baseball On A Stick, in Python: http://sourceforge.net/projects/baseballonastic/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/baseballonastic/
    - kunwardeepgill 12y ago
      Thank you for sharing this! I just started looking for MLB Data yesterday. Great timing!
  - caseydurfee 12y ago
    Awesome, thanks for this. Do you know if there are any good sources of historical betting line info for baseball? It would be fun to put together a quantopian-type site for sports betting.
ddispaltro 12y ago
Is there an open database for horse racing?
- phillc73 12y ago
  That depends on your definition of open. The short answer is no. I've searched long and hard, high and low, for free (beer) horse racing databases for UK/IRE and Australia. To a lesser extent I've searched for HK, FR and GER data. I'm yet to find anything that is comprehensive and no cost. There's a couple that I do use for UK/IRE racing which cost in the region of £35-£45 per month for access. Betwise/Smartform provides an historical database in MySQL, and daily race card/results updates. UKHorseRacing.co.uk provides CVS files with historical race data, their ratings and race results. I take these CVS files, combine them into a SQLite database and interrogate with R. A slightly longer answer is, sort of. The Betfair API is currently open access for non-commercial and low volume use (as far as I'm aware). This will allow you to retrieve basic racing data - the cards before that race with horse name, jockey, barrier etc and the race results post-race including the Betfair Starting Price. After interrogating the API, you'll need to obviously compile the data into your own database. A bit of work, but feasible. Betfair has a developer programme and their are API bindings available in a number of different languages. I use R (R package developed by Betwise mentioned above), but I know Python is available. One caveat to mention is that Betfair are upgrading their API, so this will obviously have an impact on existing programs using the old one. If anyone else has additional information or could point me in the direction of something else "free" I'd appreciate it as well.
  - joosters 12y ago
    As well as Betfair's 'live' API, they also provide historical betting data at http://data.betfair.com/ http://data.betfair.com/ It is free but you need an active account with them to download the CSV files.
    - phillc73 12y ago
      At this page you can download all historical Betfair price data in CSV format. https://promo.betfair.com/betfairsp/prices/index.php https://promo.betfair.com/betfairsp/prices/index.php
cabbeer 12y ago
Does anyone know if this is available for (American)Football?
- dirtestbird 12y ago
  Ive used this https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb and this https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame to make this http://www.ffgraf.com/ http://www.ffgraf.com/
  - burntsushi 12y ago
    Author here! That's a pretty nice visualization :-) I thought I'd just squeeze in a few words about nflgame/nfldb. Both offer access to the same stuff: play-by-play data back to 2009. Both can be used with live games so that they are updated in real time (well, at least as frequently as NFL.com). nflgame is responsible for pulling the JSON data and provides some rudimentary searching features. But it's slow. nfldb stores all this data for you in a relational database. It comes with a script that updates the database while games are playing so that you can get access to live data. (It will even migrate the database for you if I've made any changes to the schema.) Here's a quick example that shows how to get all of Julian Edelman's touchdown plays from last season: import nfldb db = nfldb.connect() q = nfldb.Query(db) q.game(season_year=2013, season_type='Regular') q.player(full_name='Julian Edelman').play(offense_tds=1) for g in q.as_plays(): print g Easy as pie! There's an extensive wiki (almost 20,000 words) with tons of examples and explanation: https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb/wiki https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb/wiki Other features: aggregating data, player meta data (college, height, weight, etc.) and fuzzy player name matching.
- cwyers 12y ago
  The same project seems to offer NFL play-by-play, but only for two seasons: https://github.com/opensport/american-football.db https://github.com/opensport/american-football.db The best public football repository I am aware of is this, though: http://www.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2010/04/play-by-play-data.html http://www.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2010/04/play-by-pla...
llimllib 12y ago
I did something pretty similar, but it seems definitely less comprehensive: https://github.com/llimllib/soccerdata/ https://github.com/llimllib/soccerdata/ . Will be using this, thanks!
abeisgreat 12y ago
I'm curious if this data is actually public domain. Where are they sourcing it from? Are they legally allowed to redistribute? Etc.
- bronson 12y ago
  Why wouldn't they? It's just raw facts, presented in their own minimal style.
  - buro9 12y ago
    In the UK this rule applies: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-otherprotect/c-databaseright.htm http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-otherprotect/c-databaseri... For copyright protection to apply, the database must have originality in the selection or arrangement of the contents and for database right to apply, there must have been a substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting its contents. It is possible that a database will satisfy both these requirements so that both copyright and database right apply. They would have a "database right" if they had placed a person at each match to gather the data and verify it, as that is a substantial investment. How they originally acquired the data is important and shouldn't be presumed. However that doesn't stop you from implementing your own database and re-acquiring the facts in some trivial way. Just bear in mind that accessing historical data may breach someone else's database right. Database rights are usually proven by fake data inserted into the database to catch people copying it. For example you could argue that the Rare Record Price Guide ( http://www.rarerecordpriceguide.com/ http://www.rarerecordpriceguide.com/ ) is just a collection of facts, and decide to copy it... but you'll discover when sued, that a few of the bands in the guide are fictional and designed to demonstrate that the database is theirs, and that it's not trivial to acquire and verify the data.
    - bronson 12y ago
      Great replies joosters and buro9. Thanks. So, for the sake of argument, if the dataset had no fake data then it would be OK? Or would they still need to demonstrate "substantial investment", no matter the state of the data? If the latter, then that gets weird quick. How many lines of code is considered substantial? How many hours hunched over a microfiche machine? It sounds like it would ultimately depend on the skill of your lawyer.
ngoel36 12y ago
Is there anywhere to get real-time play-by-play data?
- packetslave 12y ago
  There are several, and you'll pay a lot of money for them.
  - thom 12y ago
    That's true. There are some circumstances in which Opta let you do interesting things with non-realtime data though: http://www.optasports.com/playground-section.aspx http://www.optasports.com/playground-section.aspx
- maaaats 12y ago
  Betradar / Sportradar has it.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sourc3 12y ago
You, my friend, are the best. As a huge soccer fan and a developer, getting this sort of data is really hard unless you shell out hundreds of dollars a month. Already thinking about the apps that will use this! Thank you.
- sourc3 12y ago
  And kudos for calling it football :)
  - leemcalilly 12y ago
    Yes this is a stellar idea!
- isaacremuant 12y ago
  Agreed. Having this for the world cup will be awesome to try toying around with a couple of games or apps. The more the better!
- philtar 12y ago
  Last I checked it was thousands of dollars a month. Something around the tune of $25k a year. Anyone actually paying for this now and can provide pricing?
superduper33 12y ago
Careface.
rurabe 12y ago
perfect timing. thanks!
redshirtrob 12y ago
This looks cool. I see Gold Cup and NA Champion's League repos. Is there a plan to add MLS data? I know some people who would be super excited to get baseball-reference.com level data for MLS.
chevreuil 12y ago
The data format bothers me. Why not use a standard one like JSON?
- nathancahill 12y ago
  The size of JSON files is huge compared to delimited data. Languages like Python make it equally easy to consume delimited data and JSON, so it shouldn't matter much.
  - MisterBastahrd 12y ago
    At work I built a system to consume feeds of numerous automotive dealer inventories and the easiest to work with is always comma delimited. There are some people out there who have no business building an XML document, and unfortunately I've had to build adapters for many of them. It takes me a few hours to get set up to consume a new CSV feed and a few days for XML, not counting mapping their industry / category / manufacturer data to ours.
- shirkey 12y ago
  Agreed -- looking at the player data[1], IMO the format type is unrecognizable: ## GK / Goalkeepers Kawashima|Eiji Kawashima, 20 Mar 1983 Nishikawa|Shusaku Nishikawa, 18 Jun 1986 Gonda|Shūichi Gonda, 3 Mar 1989 ## DF / Defenders Inoha|Masahiko Inoha, 28 Aug 1985 G. Sakai|Gōtoku Sakai, 14 Mar 1991 Nagatomo|Yuto Nagatomo, 12 Sep 1986 Uchida|Atsuto Uchida, 27 Mar 1988 Konno|Yasuyuki Konno, 25 Jan 1983 Kurihara|Yuzo Kurihara, 18 Sep 1983 H. Sakai|Hiroki Sakai, 12 Apr 1990 Yoshida|Maya Yoshida, 24 Aug 1988 Masato Morishige, 21 May 1987 ## Japan F.C. Tokyo Comments as a double-hash, key fields are either player last name or occasionally first initial-space-last name, then three different delimiters of pipe, then comma, then tab. Choosing either a consistently delimited format or a more verbose JSON/YAML structure with clear metadata would seem to be a better approach. [1] https://github.com/openfootball/players/blob/master/asia/jp-japan/players.txt https://github.com/openfootball/players/blob/master/asia/jp-...
- wambotron 12y ago
  They do have a json web service: http://footballdb.herokuapp.com/api/v1/event/en.2013_14/round/today http://footballdb.herokuapp.com/api/v1/event/en.2013_14/roun...
keithxm23 12y ago
This is impressive for the amount of work put in to formatting the data and making it easy to use in different ways. For details and advanced analytics though, this one is much better: https://github.com/soccermetrics/soccermetrics-client-py https://github.com/soccermetrics/soccermetrics-client-py
- toyg 12y ago
  Holy fullbacks, Batman! I didn't know about SoccerMetrics. The Python client seems to be just a wrapper for their REST api: http://soccermetrics.github.io/fmrd-summary-api/started.html http://soccermetrics.github.io/fmrd-summary-api/started.html Lots of numbers to crunch there! This is all very nice but it would be nicer if there was some sort of cheap software that amateur teams could use to gather and then analyze their own data. There's a massive market out there for this sort of thing, the football world is very conservative and tends to move slowly.
  - hhamil 12y ago
    Hi, I'm the founder of Soccermetrics and the creator of the Soccermetrics API. Thanks for the attention. I've had the site for a little over five years now. I had been working on data models and algorithms for analysis of soccer matches and thought I would have a go at creating a company out of it. I even applied to YC which was a bit of a laugh in retrospect :) Right now I have another job that pays the bills but there are a few projects I do on the side, the API being one of them. The API is the latest iteration of my data models exposed to the world as well as my attempt to build as close to a REST API as I could. I don't claim perfection and I'm sure others will have their opinion on it, which I welcome. I wrote the Python client which is as you say a wrapper over the API, which serves well as a starting point. If you have ideas on how to extend it, please fork and contribute. There are a few software tools out there that do what you wish. Statzpack is one, SportyBird is another. I have my doubts about how big the market really is for this kind of service, but everyone is very early in this space.
    - toyg 12y ago
      Thanks so much for your work and for your awesome suggestions! My family (everyone except me, lol) sort-of runs an amateur football club, so I have some second-hand knowledge of that world (at least in Italy). They tell me that systematic, professional and data-driven approaches are incredibly scarce but very effective. It's a system that still runs on personal networks and a lot of outdated knowledge and "magic", not unlike the baseball world described in Moneyball [1]. As you said it's early days, but still, most coaches under 40 now bring a tablet with them on the bench, and not to take funny pictures. [1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0393324818/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&tag=subclassed-21&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0393324818&linkCode=as2 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0393324818/ref=as_li_ss_t...
veganarchocap 12y ago
Where's Derby County's stats?! Just kidding this looks great!
fiatjaf 12y ago
I don't know from where did this came from, but I like open formats. From where do the data come?
fiatjaf 12y ago
What about RSSSF? http://www.rsssf.com/ http://www.rsssf.com/
- m0skit0 12y ago
  Impressive, thanks for sharing!
fatihpense 12y ago
Also have a look at this one: http://www.football-data.co.uk/data.php http://www.football-data.co.uk/data.php
- iamwithnail 12y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty awesome. I built http://test.gmbl.io http://test.gmbl.io off that data set to learn to code. Good place to start. Kickdex is also pretty awesome, they use the Opta data to produce real time indices for teams and players.
rpedela 12y ago
A very cool project, but I have one question/issue. The data format seems to be a custom text format which admittedly I could be wrong about. Is it possible to use TSV or CSV instead since it would be infinitely more useful since it could be directly imported into relational databases, Excel, etc.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
ins429 12y ago
awesome, exactly what I need
dalek2point3 12y ago
its a shame that this is not being done under the wikidata framework. those guys have been thinking about databases like this for a while, and can be reliably trusted to at least keep it up for a reasonable amount of time.
yitchelle 12y ago
This is an interesting lecture [1] at Linuxwochen Wien 2013 that focuses on the usage of football.db. More data should be put into public domain. https://cfp.linuxwochen.at/en/lww2013/public/events/61 https://cfp.linuxwochen.at/en/lww2013/public/events/61

157 points by vinhnx 12y ago

This is really cool! Does anyone know if there are similar datasets for other sports out there? Even less clean datasets, as long as they have permissive licensing to allow sanitation and republication.

isuraed 12y ago
I believe ESPN has NBA play by play data.
- ugexe 12y ago
  ESPN is not going to license or allow you republication rights to their data. ESPN data is also extremely difficult to sanitize (play by play does not match up with box scores, is just plain wrong, different formats, terrible html).
  - knowaveragejoe 12y ago
    Which is really a shame since their app offerings are awful.
  - grayclhn 12y ago
    This, this, this. I used their (american) football data for a hobby project and it would take 30 minutes to an hour to clean one week's worth of games. Hypothetically, I found the sporting news to have much cleaner data.
cwyers 12y ago
The gold standard for freely-available sports data is baseball, with the Retrosheet project: http://retrosheet.org/ http://retrosheet.org/ The license on the data is a pretty permissive one, simply requiring attribution of the data to the Retrosheet project. Software to process Retrosheet files is available, under the GPL: http://chadwick.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html http://chadwick.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html
- bnycum 12y ago
  I'll add this. Sean Lahman's Database is also widely used. Though it's mainly whole season statistics, not game by game. Along with post-season, all star games, schools, salaries. http://www.seanlahman.com/baseball-archive/statistics/ http://www.seanlahman.com/baseball-archive/statistics/ Then of course MLB has a bunch of data here, mainly the PitchF/X data since 2008 is gathered from here. http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/ http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/
  - cwyers 12y ago
    There's several scrapers to parse the MLB XML data, the most popular (I think) is Baseball On A Stick, in Python: http://sourceforge.net/projects/baseballonastic/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/baseballonastic/
  - kunwardeepgill 12y ago
    Thank you for sharing this! I just started looking for MLB Data yesterday. Great timing!
- caseydurfee 12y ago
  Awesome, thanks for this. Do you know if there are any good sources of historical betting line info for baseball? It would be fun to put together a quantopian-type site for sports betting.

ddispaltro 12y ago

Is there an open database for horse racing?

phillc73 12y ago
That depends on your definition of open. The short answer is no. I've searched long and hard, high and low, for free (beer) horse racing databases for UK/IRE and Australia. To a lesser extent I've searched for HK, FR and GER data. I'm yet to find anything that is comprehensive and no cost. There's a couple that I do use for UK/IRE racing which cost in the region of £35-£45 per month for access. Betwise/Smartform provides an historical database in MySQL, and daily race card/results updates. UKHorseRacing.co.uk provides CVS files with historical race data, their ratings and race results. I take these CVS files, combine them into a SQLite database and interrogate with R. A slightly longer answer is, sort of. The Betfair API is currently open access for non-commercial and low volume use (as far as I'm aware). This will allow you to retrieve basic racing data - the cards before that race with horse name, jockey, barrier etc and the race results post-race including the Betfair Starting Price. After interrogating the API, you'll need to obviously compile the data into your own database. A bit of work, but feasible. Betfair has a developer programme and their are API bindings available in a number of different languages. I use R (R package developed by Betwise mentioned above), but I know Python is available. One caveat to mention is that Betfair are upgrading their API, so this will obviously have an impact on existing programs using the old one. If anyone else has additional information or could point me in the direction of something else "free" I'd appreciate it as well.
- joosters 12y ago
  As well as Betfair's 'live' API, they also provide historical betting data at http://data.betfair.com/ http://data.betfair.com/ It is free but you need an active account with them to download the CSV files.
  - phillc73 12y ago
    At this page you can download all historical Betfair price data in CSV format. https://promo.betfair.com/betfairsp/prices/index.php https://promo.betfair.com/betfairsp/prices/index.php

cabbeer 12y ago

Does anyone know if this is available for (American)Football?

dirtestbird 12y ago
Ive used this https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb and this https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame to make this http://www.ffgraf.com/ http://www.ffgraf.com/
- burntsushi 12y ago
  Author here! That's a pretty nice visualization :-) I thought I'd just squeeze in a few words about nflgame/nfldb. Both offer access to the same stuff: play-by-play data back to 2009. Both can be used with live games so that they are updated in real time (well, at least as frequently as NFL.com). nflgame is responsible for pulling the JSON data and provides some rudimentary searching features. But it's slow. nfldb stores all this data for you in a relational database. It comes with a script that updates the database while games are playing so that you can get access to live data. (It will even migrate the database for you if I've made any changes to the schema.) Here's a quick example that shows how to get all of Julian Edelman's touchdown plays from last season: import nfldb db = nfldb.connect() q = nfldb.Query(db) q.game(season_year=2013, season_type='Regular') q.player(full_name='Julian Edelman').play(offense_tds=1) for g in q.as_plays(): print g Easy as pie! There's an extensive wiki (almost 20,000 words) with tons of examples and explanation: https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb/wiki https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb/wiki Other features: aggregating data, player meta data (college, height, weight, etc.) and fuzzy player name matching.
cwyers 12y ago
The same project seems to offer NFL play-by-play, but only for two seasons: https://github.com/opensport/american-football.db https://github.com/opensport/american-football.db The best public football repository I am aware of is this, though: http://www.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2010/04/play-by-play-data.html http://www.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2010/04/play-by-pla...

llimllib 12y ago

I did something pretty similar, but it seems definitely less comprehensive: https://github.com/llimllib/soccerdata/ https://github.com/llimllib/soccerdata/ . Will be using this, thanks!

abeisgreat 12y ago

I'm curious if this data is actually public domain. Where are they sourcing it from? Are they legally allowed to redistribute? Etc.

bronson 12y ago
Why wouldn't they? It's just raw facts, presented in their own minimal style.
- buro9 12y ago
  In the UK this rule applies: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-otherprotect/c-databaseright.htm http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-otherprotect/c-databaseri... For copyright protection to apply, the database must have originality in the selection or arrangement of the contents and for database right to apply, there must have been a substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting its contents. It is possible that a database will satisfy both these requirements so that both copyright and database right apply. They would have a "database right" if they had placed a person at each match to gather the data and verify it, as that is a substantial investment. How they originally acquired the data is important and shouldn't be presumed. However that doesn't stop you from implementing your own database and re-acquiring the facts in some trivial way. Just bear in mind that accessing historical data may breach someone else's database right. Database rights are usually proven by fake data inserted into the database to catch people copying it. For example you could argue that the Rare Record Price Guide ( http://www.rarerecordpriceguide.com/ http://www.rarerecordpriceguide.com/ ) is just a collection of facts, and decide to copy it... but you'll discover when sued, that a few of the bands in the guide are fictional and designed to demonstrate that the database is theirs, and that it's not trivial to acquire and verify the data.
  - bronson 12y ago
    Great replies joosters and buro9. Thanks. So, for the sake of argument, if the dataset had no fake data then it would be OK? Or would they still need to demonstrate "substantial investment", no matter the state of the data? If the latter, then that gets weird quick. How many lines of code is considered substantial? How many hours hunched over a microfiche machine? It sounds like it would ultimately depend on the skill of your lawyer.

ngoel36 12y ago

Is there anywhere to get real-time play-by-play data?

packetslave 12y ago
There are several, and you'll pay a lot of money for them.
- thom 12y ago
  That's true. There are some circumstances in which Opta let you do interesting things with non-realtime data though: http://www.optasports.com/playground-section.aspx http://www.optasports.com/playground-section.aspx
maaaats 12y ago
Betradar / Sportradar has it.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

sourc3 12y ago

You, my friend, are the best. As a huge soccer fan and a developer, getting this sort of data is really hard unless you shell out hundreds of dollars a month. Already thinking about the apps that will use this! Thank you.

sourc3 12y ago
And kudos for calling it football :)
- leemcalilly 12y ago
  Yes this is a stellar idea!
isaacremuant 12y ago
Agreed. Having this for the world cup will be awesome to try toying around with a couple of games or apps. The more the better!
philtar 12y ago
Last I checked it was thousands of dollars a month. Something around the tune of $25k a year. Anyone actually paying for this now and can provide pricing?

superduper33 12y ago

Careface.

rurabe 12y ago

perfect timing. thanks!

redshirtrob 12y ago

This looks cool. I see Gold Cup and NA Champion's League repos. Is there a plan to add MLS data? I know some people who would be super excited to get baseball-reference.com level data for MLS.

chevreuil 12y ago

The data format bothers me. Why not use a standard one like JSON?

nathancahill 12y ago
The size of JSON files is huge compared to delimited data. Languages like Python make it equally easy to consume delimited data and JSON, so it shouldn't matter much.
- MisterBastahrd 12y ago
  At work I built a system to consume feeds of numerous automotive dealer inventories and the easiest to work with is always comma delimited. There are some people out there who have no business building an XML document, and unfortunately I've had to build adapters for many of them. It takes me a few hours to get set up to consume a new CSV feed and a few days for XML, not counting mapping their industry / category / manufacturer data to ours.
shirkey 12y ago
Agreed -- looking at the player data[1], IMO the format type is unrecognizable: ## GK / Goalkeepers Kawashima|Eiji Kawashima, 20 Mar 1983 Nishikawa|Shusaku Nishikawa, 18 Jun 1986 Gonda|Shūichi Gonda, 3 Mar 1989 ## DF / Defenders Inoha|Masahiko Inoha, 28 Aug 1985 G. Sakai|Gōtoku Sakai, 14 Mar 1991 Nagatomo|Yuto Nagatomo, 12 Sep 1986 Uchida|Atsuto Uchida, 27 Mar 1988 Konno|Yasuyuki Konno, 25 Jan 1983 Kurihara|Yuzo Kurihara, 18 Sep 1983 H. Sakai|Hiroki Sakai, 12 Apr 1990 Yoshida|Maya Yoshida, 24 Aug 1988 Masato Morishige, 21 May 1987 ## Japan F.C. Tokyo Comments as a double-hash, key fields are either player last name or occasionally first initial-space-last name, then three different delimiters of pipe, then comma, then tab. Choosing either a consistently delimited format or a more verbose JSON/YAML structure with clear metadata would seem to be a better approach. [1] https://github.com/openfootball/players/blob/master/asia/jp-japan/players.txt https://github.com/openfootball/players/blob/master/asia/jp-...
wambotron 12y ago
They do have a json web service: http://footballdb.herokuapp.com/api/v1/event/en.2013_14/round/today http://footballdb.herokuapp.com/api/v1/event/en.2013_14/roun...

keithxm23 12y ago

This is impressive for the amount of work put in to formatting the data and making it easy to use in different ways. For details and advanced analytics though, this one is much better: https://github.com/soccermetrics/soccermetrics-client-py https://github.com/soccermetrics/soccermetrics-client-py

toyg 12y ago
Holy fullbacks, Batman! I didn't know about SoccerMetrics. The Python client seems to be just a wrapper for their REST api: http://soccermetrics.github.io/fmrd-summary-api/started.html http://soccermetrics.github.io/fmrd-summary-api/started.html Lots of numbers to crunch there! This is all very nice but it would be nicer if there was some sort of cheap software that amateur teams could use to gather and then analyze their own data. There's a massive market out there for this sort of thing, the football world is very conservative and tends to move slowly.
- hhamil 12y ago
  Hi, I'm the founder of Soccermetrics and the creator of the Soccermetrics API. Thanks for the attention. I've had the site for a little over five years now. I had been working on data models and algorithms for analysis of soccer matches and thought I would have a go at creating a company out of it. I even applied to YC which was a bit of a laugh in retrospect :) Right now I have another job that pays the bills but there are a few projects I do on the side, the API being one of them. The API is the latest iteration of my data models exposed to the world as well as my attempt to build as close to a REST API as I could. I don't claim perfection and I'm sure others will have their opinion on it, which I welcome. I wrote the Python client which is as you say a wrapper over the API, which serves well as a starting point. If you have ideas on how to extend it, please fork and contribute. There are a few software tools out there that do what you wish. Statzpack is one, SportyBird is another. I have my doubts about how big the market really is for this kind of service, but everyone is very early in this space.
  - toyg 12y ago
    Thanks so much for your work and for your awesome suggestions! My family (everyone except me, lol) sort-of runs an amateur football club, so I have some second-hand knowledge of that world (at least in Italy). They tell me that systematic, professional and data-driven approaches are incredibly scarce but very effective. It's a system that still runs on personal networks and a lot of outdated knowledge and "magic", not unlike the baseball world described in Moneyball [1]. As you said it's early days, but still, most coaches under 40 now bring a tablet with them on the bench, and not to take funny pictures. [1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0393324818/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&tag=subclassed-21&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0393324818&linkCode=as2 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0393324818/ref=as_li_ss_t...

veganarchocap 12y ago

Where's Derby County's stats?! Just kidding this looks great!

fiatjaf 12y ago

I don't know from where did this came from, but I like open formats. From where do the data come?

fiatjaf 12y ago

What about RSSSF? http://www.rsssf.com/ http://www.rsssf.com/

m0skit0 12y ago
Impressive, thanks for sharing!

fatihpense 12y ago

Also have a look at this one: http://www.football-data.co.uk/data.php http://www.football-data.co.uk/data.php

iamwithnail 12y ago
Yeah, it's pretty awesome. I built http://test.gmbl.io http://test.gmbl.io off that data set to learn to code. Good place to start. Kickdex is also pretty awesome, they use the Opta data to produce real time indices for teams and players.

rpedela 12y ago

A very cool project, but I have one question/issue. The data format seems to be a custom text format which admittedly I could be wrong about. Is it possible to use TSV or CSV instead since it would be infinitely more useful since it could be directly imported into relational databases, Excel, etc.

deleted 12y ago
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ins429 12y ago

awesome, exactly what I need

dalek2point3 12y ago

its a shame that this is not being done under the wikidata framework. those guys have been thinking about databases like this for a while, and can be reliably trusted to at least keep it up for a reasonable amount of time.

yitchelle 12y ago

This is an interesting lecture [1] at Linuxwochen Wien 2013 that focuses on the usage of football.db. More data should be put into public domain. https://cfp.linuxwochen.at/en/lww2013/public/events/61 https://cfp.linuxwochen.at/en/lww2013/public/events/61