StatsBomb is celebrating a 10th anniversary this summer: a decade since the forming of the website to share and host work from the analytics community. The foundation of the website and the business are community-based, and we've always been keen to pay it back.
So this summer, we're releasing the 2015/16 Big 5 League seasons, on our industry-leading data spec, for free.
1,826 matches, 98 teams, ~2,500 players, and ~6,000,000 rows of event data to work with.
Our previous data releases have included longitudinal data (the Messi Data Biography), StatsBomb 360 data (the World Cup and EUROs data releases), and historical data (the Arsenal Invincibles project). But not since the 2018-2021 Women's Super League data releases have we released full seasons of data to work with. The 2015/16 Big 5 Leagues data release aims to allow analysts to study big datasets and work with multiple competitions of data. We know this data will also be useful to the academic sector, from whom we often receive requests for datasets of this type.
To help you work with the data, we created the Using StatsBomb Data In R and Using StatsBomb Data In Python guides. There's also more advice and guidance available in the How To Get Started In Football Analytics article.
Today we release Serie A. The other four leagues are linked here:
Competition_id = 12, season_id = 27
This was very much in the 'Old Lady' era, as Juventus won their fifth successive Serie A title, largely thanks to the brilliance of the BBC defensive wall - Leonardo Bonucci, Andrea Barzagli and Giorgio Chiellini. Juventus conceded just 20 goals in 38 league games, and 'keeper Gianluigi Buffon broke the Serie A record for the longest time played without conceding a goal, 974 minutes.
There was a new challenger in town, as Maurizio Sarri led Napoli to 2nd in his first season in charge of the club.
And another record was toppled at the other end of the pitch, as Gonzalo Higuaín plundered 36 goals to beat Gunnar Nordahl's record for most goals scored in a 20-team Serie A season.
Elsewhere, there was Mohamed Salah getting ready for a blowout 2016/17 season as he registered a 14 goal, 6 assist season in 2015/16, and targetman Luca Toni's final Serie A campaign before retirement.
The Serie A release is part 3/5 of the Big 5 Leagues data release, designed to give analysts and academics the opportunity to work with big datasets from major competitions. We hope you enjoy the data.
Best of luck,
The StatsBomb Team
