Past Soccer Data

[Bsims]

I am thinking about starting a project to wager on soccer. I would need to develop a data driven system. To do so I would need data on past games. The data needed would include the odds and the results.

1. Anyone have a large amount of this data and is willing to share?
2. Anyone know a site that has this data that is downloadable?
3. Anyone know of a site that has this data, but not downloadable, and possibly scrapable?
4. Anyone have a program that can scrape this data and is willing to share?

I am considering learning Python in order to be able to scrape the data that I want. But this will introduce a fair amount of work before I begin the project. That is why I am looking for a shortcut.

[oilcountry99]

https://www.football-data.co.uk/

right hand side , excel format

[HeeeHAWWWW]

Lots of data out here, good list here: https://datahub.io/collections/football

[Waterstpub87]

A tip for python. See if you can use pandas.read_html to scrape it. There are packages like beautiful soup or others, but if you are a beginner, they might be a little challenging. If the page is set up with the data in tables in the right format, it will drop it into a dataframe with very little effort.

College basketball reference is set up like this, was 2 lines of code or so to get the data

[Josy]

Bsims, you can find a good set of soccer and other sports data on oddsportal site. For soccer:

https://www.oddsportal.com/results/#soccer

[Vyasports]

I am thinking about starting a project to wager on soccer. I would need to develop a data driven system. To do so I would need data on past games. The data needed would include the odds and the results.

1. Anyone have a large amount of this data and is willing to share?
2. Anyone know a site that has this data that is downloadable?
3. Anyone know of a site that has this data, but not downloadable, and possibly scrapable?
4. Anyone have a program that can scrape this data and is willing to share?

I am considering learning Python in order to be able to scrape the data that I want. But this will introduce a fair amount of work before I begin the project. That is why I am looking for a shortcut.

IMHO first and foremost, any bettor must develop a money management skill. There is absolutely no use of any betting system if you do not know how to manage your profits and losses. You can win 100 bets in a row and lose one, and still your net profit is negative... a lot of websites have already done what you are setting out to do... using past performances/results to calculate possible future outcome... trust me when i tell you, if you want to be successful on soccer betting, then you should learn about the present teams/players. Start from that... with time it will get easy

[Bsims]

IMHO first and foremost, any bettor must develop a money management skill. There is absolutely no use of any betting system if you do not know how to manage your profits and losses. You can win 100 bets in a row and lose one, and still your net profit is negative...

Absolutely agree, money management is as important as picking wagers. Last fall, I "celebrated" my 50th year wagering on sports. I've learned a tremendous amount over those years and millions of dollars wagered. Frankly, I'm I bad bettor. At the bottom of my problem is money management. No discipline. Probably too old to change now.

[Bsims]

a lot of websites have already done what you are setting out to do... using past performances/results to calculate possible future outcome... trust me when i tell you, if you want to be successful on soccer betting, then you should learn about the present teams/players. Start from that... with time it will get easy

Basically the difference is the same as investing in the markets. Fundamental versus technical analysis. Over 50 successful years here. Never had much faith in technical analysis. Only recently venturing here. Mainly as recreation and an outlet for my programming and data analysis hobby.

Relative to sports, you have basically described fundamental analysis. I agree that this would be the best way of selecting wagers. I've done a little of this. However, I find some negatives with this approach. First it takes a lot of time and limits you to a few events at a time. Second, at some point in the analysis I would reach a tentative conclusion. Then as I progress further, I tend to look at things that reinforce that conclusion. Occasionally not. But the reinforcement is bad.

By developing a data driven system I can look at a large number of events and a variety of wagers. But most importantly, it's fun analyzing past data and building the systems. That's really my hobby.

A famous gambler once said that betting wasn't about money, that's just how we keep score. Betting on these systems that I develop is the way I keep score.

[cincinnatikid513]

problem with past data in soccer is the rosters are constantly changing, u can look at h2h or games from 2 to 3 years ago and there will be only a few of the same players on a team, also south america is huge on turnover it amazes me how argentina and especially brazil it's like players have 1 year contracts and move to a new team, nobody stays very long, i would recommend totals or pk likes beating the 3 way line is tough