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 going to release 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 StatsBombR and StatsBombPy packages, and have released a 'Working With StatsBomb In R' guide to support and accelerate the learning process.
We will be releasing one league at a time. The Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A, and Ligue 1 will shortly follow throughout the summer, but today we're starting with La Liga.
Competition_id = 11, season_id = 27
The 2015/16 La Liga season was memorable for the three-way title race that played out between Barcelona (91 points), Real Madrid (90), and Atletico Madrid (88). Luis Enrique led Barça to their 24th La Liga title, calling on the iconic 'MSN' triumvirate of Lionel Messi, Neymar, and Luis Suárez. Suárez, in particular, excelled that season, netting 40 goals (the most by a non-Messi/Ronaldo player in the modern era) and laying on 15 assists at a non-penalty goals + assists per 90 rate of 1.43.
We saw the start of the Zinedine Zidane era at Real Madrid, as the Madrid legend returned to the club in January to replace Rafa Benítez in the Bernabeu dugout. Gareth Bale had arguably his best season for Los Blancos, scoring 19 goals and 10 assists despite playing only 19.9 90s, as Real pushed Barcelona all the way in the title race.
And what of Atleti? The Atlético Madrid of 2015/16 was the quintessentially gritty Atleti of the early years of Diego Simeone's management. This was their defence at their very best. Atleti 'keeper Jan Oblak conceded 18 goals: a record low for goals conceded in La Liga.
Elsewhere, you had the David Moyes/Real Sociedad crossover, Gary Neville's stint at Valencia, and José Luis Mendilibar at Eibar, who became one of Europe's most effective pressing teams under his tutelage.
The La Liga release is part 1/5 of the Big 5 Leagues data release. Make sure to follow StatsBomb on Twitter and LinkedIn to find out when the next leagues are made available. There will also be another data release project this summer, but the details of that are going to remain secret for a couple more weeks…
Best of luck,
The StatsBomb Team
