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've been 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 the Bundesliga. The other four leagues are linked here:
Competition_id = 9, season_id = 27
In this dataset, you'll be getting a taste of Pep Guardiola-era Bayern Munich, with the Bavarian's winning their third successive title under his management. So there's the obvious tactical angle to get stuck into there, especially knowing what came after with Manchester City. But, on a more fun level, perhaps, there's some iconic players to analyse here. Late-career Robben! Ribery! Xabi Alonso! Lahm! Robert Lewandowski in the middle of his never-ending prime. Arturo Vidal, Thiago Alcântara, Thomas Müller... we'll stop there before we name the entire squad. This was a stacked team under a legendary manager. There's plenty to dig into here.
Borussia Dortmund pushed Bayern close in the title race, in the season after Jürgen Klopp had departed. Thomas Tuchel had taken the reigns and with Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Marco Reus, İlkay Gündoğan, and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, the team top-scored in the league with 82 goals in 34 games.
Elsewhere, there was a 29 year old Julian Nagelsmann taking over Hoffenheim in February, and young starlets such as Christian Pulisic, Leroy Sané, and Timo Werner getting breakout minutes at their respective clubs.
The Bundesliga release is part 4/5 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
