Baseball writers depend so deeply on Baseball Reference as a statistical resource that the site’s title almost seems as if it were really “Indispensable Baseball Reference.” (No, really, check Twitter.)
That site is the flagship of former math professor Sean Forman’s platform, Sports Reference. And now, joining Baseball Reference is Forman’s latest creation, FBRef, just in time for the World Cup. Pages on FBRef for each of the 32 national teams in Russia this summer list each participating player and his club statistics, and stats are available dating back to the 1990s for the six top soccer circuits in England, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and the U.S.
“I hate to say this as the creator of Baseball Reference,” Forman said, “but I probably watch more soccer than I do baseball at this point.”
The idea for a soccer site dates back seven or eight years. By then the Sports Reference stable had grown to six sports—baseball, pro basketball, college basketball, pro football, college football, and hockey—so soccer seemed like an obvious candidate. The only problem: at the time, Forman was just a World Cup soccer fan who loosely followed the U.S. national team and admits he had little understanding or background with the international club soccer circuit.
“In retrospect, it was idiotic of me to think we had any chance of even coming close to producing anything of any quality or value,” he said.
In the first English Premier League match he watched at the beginning of the 2011/12 season, Manchester City defeated Swansea City 4-0 with new transfer Sergio Agüero scoring twice in his EPL debut. Forman was hooked. When NBC began broadcasting the EPL from 2013 onwards, Forman would have ample opportunity to keep watching.
For the final game of the 2011/12 season, when Man City had a shot at winning its first Premier League title in 44 years, Forman recorded the match to watch after his son’s Little League game. His DVR recording was one of the most exciting moments in EPL history, with Agüero scoring the championship-clinching goal in the 94th minute. At the end of the acknowledgements in FBRef’s welcome letter is a thank you to “Sergio Agüero for scoring THAT goal, which ignited a previously unrealized passion for football in Sean Forman.”
“We’re coming at it now from a position where we know what we’re doing and what it entails and what’s involved,” Forman said. “We’ve tried to give it the proper reverence and humility.”
In the timeline of events during the site’s development, Forman added that there was “a brief addiction to Football Manager, and that took up the better portion of a year of my life.”
So far traffic has primarily originated from the U.S. where Sports Reference is a known brand, but Forman hopes this will be his first truly global site. There will be numerous iterations of FBRef, and eventually there will be translations into other languages and the addition of stats from more soccer leagues.
Forman said MLB trade deadline day annually yields the most visitors “by a pretty wide margin,” with the NBA deadline second. He foresees the international soccer transfer market being a similar driver. If, say, Liverpool adds a player from Croatia, there will be great interest in the new player; FBRef ultimately will host that country’s soccer stats, too.
“Today I’m oscillating between ‘Wow, we’ve got a lot done,’” he said, “and ‘Wow, we really have a lot to do.’”