data, Home Page, Scraping, sports

The Guide to Sports Data

This guide is to help you understand where to find data on sports, especially free sports data. Most of it requires coding so I’m working on creating a data scraping guide too. To skip all this work, sign up at Sports Data Direct and let them deal with getting the data for you.

MLB Data

The MLB has the most freely available data out of any sport. That’s because baseball captured the fascination of statisticians like Bill James, Pete Palmer and Dick Cramer who went on to create the field known as Sabermetrics.[1]http://sabr.org/sabermetrics

Stats

Stats are fine to scrape per copyright law.[2]https://www.sports-reference.com/data_use.html

Salary Information

MLB Models

Fuzzy waters, legality questionable.

NFL Data

Stats

  • Pro Football Reference
    • Most comprehensive source.
      • Contains just about everything including combines, postseason, salaries, weather, Vegas lines, and play by play
      • Data coverage
  • Football DB
    • Comprehensive stats in easy to scrape format
    • A bit more limited compared to Pro Football Reference

NFL Models

NBA Data

Stats

NBA Models

NHL Data

Stats

NHL Models

General

Legality

Per Sports-Reference.com, “copyright law is clear that facts cannot be copyrighted, so you are free to reuse facts on this site in accordance with copyright laws.”

News Outlets

The main use of news outlet sites should be for injuries or projections. Besides that they aren’t great.

Fantasy Football

Finding historical data on fantasy football is tough.

Daily Fantasy Data

Probably legal to scrape this information

  • Rotogrinders
    • Daily updated salary, odds, and starting lineup information
    • Much easier than manually downloading the csv from Draft Kings or Fan Duel every day
    • Lineup generator
  • Brainy DFS
  • Roto World
    • Comprehensive source of starting lineups, latest news, and historical news
    • Think of this like a Sports Reference site tailored to Daily Fantasy Sports
  • Rotoguru
    • Historical salary information
    • Inconsistent years and may now be defunct

Daily Fantasy Sites

  • Fan Duel
    • Data behind paywall
    • More information coming soon

Odds

Probably legal to scrape (similar class to daily fantasy)

Weather

Daily Fantasy Sports

  • Fantasy Labs
    • Run by Jonathan Bales (famous DFS player)
    • Contains lineup builder, trend analyzer, player ownership, Vegas implied ownership, and other stats
  • RotoQL
    • Run by Saahil Sud (famous DFS player)
    • More focus on expected value than ownership.

General Sports Data

  • Sports Data Direct [3]Affiliated with this blog
    • Focused more on conventional bets than DFS for now
    • Initial release features NFL data
    • Cheap subscription
    • Not ready yet
  • STATS
    • By far the biggest name
    • Real time data and proven quality
    • Costly packages reportedly in 4+figures per season and you have to talk to a sales rep
  • Sports Reference

If I missed something feel free to email or reply in the comments so I can add it

References

References
1 http://sabr.org/sabermetrics
2 https://www.sports-reference.com/data_use.html
3 Affiliated with this blog

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