Fantasy football fans have been trying to use data to find an advantage over their opponents, and this week they, and fans in general, were given a surprise.
Fantasy football players were handed a surprise earlier this week (Image: Rex/Fantasy Premier League)
Unless you belong to a certain corner of the football internet, this week’s announcement from data site FBref may not have registered. But if you’re in that group, you may have felt like the sky was falling.
For many years, FBref has sourced data from sports analytics company Opta to provide analysts, Fantasy Premier League (FPL) players, and even just fans easy access to detailed statistics such as expected goals for a number of top football leagues. But almost overnight, that depth of coverage disappeared.
“At Sports Reference, we take great pride in the role FBref has played over the past seven years as a comprehensive source of information for soccer fans around the world,” a blog post shared on Tuesday said.
“Unfortunately, last week we received a letter from the provider of our advanced soccer data requesting that we cease access to their data feed and immediately remove the data from the site. As a result, we have complied with the provider’s request and removed their data from FBref and Stathead.”
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If you checked social media when this news broke, you’ll have seen many posts along similar lines. We realized that FBref no longer provides detailed data from Opta and what that means going forward, especially for the FPL community.
“Maybe someday there will be more, but for now I’m just disappointed,” Scott Willis of the stats-driven website Cannon Stats wrote on social media. “This has been a great resource for people who love the game.”
Reports emerged on Wednesday morning that Bournemouth are set to sign Brazilian player Rayane. “Normally I would go directly to FBref and check his past fundamentals,” soccer YouTuber FPL Pricey said, along with a tearful emoji.
FBref was one of many resources used by FPL players, providing sophisticated data in an easy-to-use format. For some, it was almost a cheat code, even if it required some original work. For some, this was the place to look at a striker’s fundamental numbers to determine if they could continue their scoring run or if they were on an unsustainable run of form, or to compare two defenders and make an informed decision on which one to bring in after your chosen player suffers a long-term injury.
Some fans may have used FBref to independently scout Premier League targets like Ryan (Image: Riquelve Nata/Sports Press Photo/Getty Images)
Mike Goodman, senior soccer editor at CBS Sports and co-host of soccer analysis podcast The Double Pivot, remembers a time before FBref had this data. Goodman, who has been professionally involved with both FBref itself and its former data provider, StatsBomb, explains how things were very different these days and 10 years ago.
“I’ve been in this job for a long time, so I started before FBref existed as an advanced data place,” Goodman told The Mirror. “If you want to work in the public realm and you have a hobby, you need to understand how you get the data, what data exists in the public realm, where it resides, and a lot of what you could do was limited by the data you had.
“A lot of what drove the work and creativity was, ‘This is the data I have, what can I do with it?’ FBref really expanded the range of what I could do for people who were working without institutional support.”
In the years since then, more mainstream media has been able to catch up. While the concept of watching Match of the Day or live match xG would have seemed foreign not so long ago, there is an argument that FBref and other sources have played a role in bringing such information more directly to the public.
There has been speculation as to Opta’s motives for removing its advanced data from FBref. However, some observers took note of the announcement, also this week, that FIFA had selected Opta owner Stats Perform as its “first official global betting data and betting streaming rights distributor”, putting two and two together.
“Are other sites affected?” one Reddit commenter asked. “The wording of the update makes it sound like Opta is changing the way it uses data. I’m sure some sites have changed access rights as well.”
Holly Shand, an FPL content creator who works on the Fantasy Football Hub platform, uses Opta data to help model and predict free games. She explains that despite having free access to FBref data, some FPL players are reluctant to pay for specialized sites, and while she recognizes that there may be some immediate impact, she is also aware of how widespread certain data is when it comes to the public domain.
Fantasy Football Hub player comparison (Image: Fantasy Football Hub)
“We[as FPL content creators]use a lot of stuff and pull information from the FPL site in a lot of our content,” Shand says. “But I always feel like it’s like, as a content creator for FPL, I’m promoting their product by using some of FPL’s products in my content, so I don’t see how that fits with Opta.
“Obviously, there are a lot of questions being asked, but I think that at some point crossovers will be acceptable. And that’s only when somebody starts to have more freedom, or, you know, more people use crossovers to make profits that don’t really have anything to do with crossovers.”
While using Opta data within his Fantasy Football Hub role, Shand has also been working on developing his own model for mapping player form charts. She preaches the value of creating models that are specifically tailored to FPL, but recognizes that these models still require input, although for example, the qualities that are valuable for Premier League players from an FPL perspective are not necessarily the same qualities that real-life managers and recruitment departments are looking for.
FPL players aren’t the only ones affected. Journalist Grace Robertson, who uses FBref data to inform the Football Newsletter, was essentially blindsided by the news in that it could force a change in approach.
“It was a bit of a shock, and I think I’ll probably use less data at work in the future,” she says. “If providers try to make it increasingly difficult to access information without paying big bucks, it will only become more difficult to use analytics to talk about football.”
Robertson previously had access to StatsBomb data while writing for the organization, but said he has been using FBref more or less since its launch. “I think FBRef has always been the best at laying things out in a clear and easy way,” she says.
“Many other sites with this kind of data make it very difficult to get the details and find exactly what you’re looking for. FBRef is the leader in making everything available to you on the fly in a way that makes sense.”
How much FBref will be missed will likely depend on what comes along to fill the gap left by FBref. The ‘advanced’ data it provided still influences the way we talk about football, on television, in the written media, and even in games like EA FC, where post-match statistics include expected goals.
We may get an idea of what the future holds when we see the outcome of Opta and FIFA’s 2026 World Cup exclusive deal in the summer. For example, how much is kept behind closed doors for betting data contract purposes and how much is made public during broadcast coverage of a tournament.
“It costs money to produce these statistics, and it does. So how the statistics companies make money is an issue in itself,” Goodman added.
“How public enterprises can afford to buy and provide statistics is a complex issue. These are all hurdles that need to be cleared in the process of providing data to the public.
“I have no idea how these decisions were made, but I certainly understand why the business of gambling and FIFA is good business for Opta. I certainly understand that it’s difficult to get the data when the model is providing data publicly. It’s difficult.”
“But I think in the long run, fans are going to lose out, right? Like, fans who want to consume this stuff are going to have nowhere to go to see it, to learn about it, to engage with it.”
This may be the underlying reason why this news has caused such a visceral reaction in certain communities, even though it is largely unknown elsewhere. While some soccer fans enjoy the game without having to dig deep into the underlying data and instead focus on the story and the emotional appeal of the sport, others feel that the numbers emphasize it all.
In some ways, there is a fear that the democratization of data and its consequent mainstreaming has created new problems while solving old ones. As Robertson suggests, “Once Opta knows it can charge big media companies big bucks for its data, they won’t want to simply let the average fan watch everything for free.” And there’s no reason to think Opta will be alone in this regard.
Mr. Goodman added: “FBRef became central to a lot of things that went mainstream and how we consumed sports over the last decade, and it disappeared overnight. So it’s the fans who are suffering.
“There are fans who are engaging with statistics in a more robust way, whether it’s through gambling or just as a hobby. They’re doing more robust research and modeling and things like that. And they’re also going to be affected quite, quite significantly. But really, the only people who are losing out are the people who want to see the numbers about football and feel that it makes them a more informed fan.”
Mirror Football has contacted Opta for comment.
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