Fantasy Football fans' nightmare comes true as sudden U-turn sees 'FPL cheat code' pulled
Unless you belong to certain corners of the football internet, this week’s announcement from data site FBref might not have registered. If you do belong to that group, though, it might have felt as though the sky was falling.
FBref has, for years, provided analysts, Fantasy Premier League (FPL) players and even just fans with easy access to in-depth statistics, such as expected goals, across a number of top football leagues, pulling its data from sports analytics company Opta. Pretty much overnight, though, that depth of coverage was gone.
“At Sports Reference we have taken great pride in the role FBref has played over the last seven years as an expansive source for soccer fans all over the world,” a blog post shared on Tuesday read.
“Unfortunately, last week the provider of our advanced soccer data sent us a letter terminating our access to their data feeds and requiring the deletion of their data from the site immediately. As a result, we have removed the provider's data from FBref and Stathead in compliance with their demand.”
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If you checked social media as the news broke, you’ll have seen a number of posts of a similar flavour. A realisation of what FBref no longer providing detailed data from Opta and a recognition of what that might mean going forward - especially for the FPL community.
“Maybe someday we will have more but for now I’m just bummed,” Scott Willis of stats-led website Cannon Stats wrote on social media. “That was a great resource for people who loved the game.”
On Wednesday morning, reports of Bournemouth's move for Brazilian player Rayan came to light. “Normally, I’d go straight to FBref to check his historic underlying data,” football YouTuber FPL Pricey said, alongside a single tear emoji.
FBref was one of just a number of resources used by FPL players but it was one which provided sophisticated data in an easy-to-use format - almost a cheat code for some, albeit one which required work of their own. For some people, this was where you went to look at a striker’s underlying numbers to determine if they could continue their scoring form or were just on an unsustainable hot streak, or to compare two defenders to make an informed decision on which to bring in after another of your picks sustained a long-term injury.
Mike Goodman, senior editor for soccer at CBS Sports and co-host of football analytics podcast The Double Pivot, remembers a time before FBref had this data. Goodman, who has had professional involvement with both FBref itself and its former data provider StatsBomb, explains how things were very different as recently as a decade ago.
“I have been doing this long enough that I started before FBref existed as an advanced data place,” Goodman told The Mirror. “If you wanted to work in public and you were a hobbyist [it] involved figuring out how to get data, what data existed in public and where. And a lot of what you could do was bounded by the data you get your hands on.
“A lot of what drove work and creativity was 'this is the data I have, what can I do with it?' FBref really, for anybody working without institutional backing, just expanded the bounds of what you could do in significant ways.”
In the years since, more mainstream outlets have been able to catch up. The concept of seeing xG on Match of the Day or during live match coverage would have felt alien not that long ago but there’s an argument that FBref and other sources played a part in bringing such information into the public eye more directly.
There has been speculation about Opta’s motivations for removing its advanced data from FBref. However, some observers have spotted the announcement - also this week - that FIFA has chosen Opta owner Stats Perform as its “first official worldwide betting data and betting streaming rights distributor” and put two and two together.
“I wonder if other sites will also be affected?” one commenter on Reddit asked. “The way that update is worded makes it sound like Opta are changing how their data gets used, and I'm sure several sites have had their access rights changed too.”
Holly Shand, an FPL content creator who works for the Fantasy Football Hub platform, uses Opta data to help with modelling and predictions in the free game. While she recognises there may be some immediate impact, explaining some FPL players have been reluctant to pay for specialist sites when they can access FBref data for free, she also recognises how widespread certain data has become when it comes to the public domain.