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 StatsBombR and StatsBombPy packages, and have released a 'Working With StatsBomb In R' guide to support and accelerate the learning process.
Today we release the final league: Ligue 1. The other four leagues are already released and linked here:
Competition_id = 7, season_id = 27
Note: We were unable to source video for three matches from this season - the only matches in the entire 2015/16 Big 5 leagues data release that we couldn't collect! These were: Bastia vs AC Gazélec Ajaccio, 22/11/2015; Saint-Etienne vs Paris Saint-Germain, 31/01/2016; Troyes vs Bordeaux, 30/04/2016.
The 2015/16 Ligue 1 season was won by Paris Saint-Germain under Laurent Blanc. "Won" might be putting it mildly, seeing as they had the title wrapped up in March after a 9-0 win over Troyes, and finished 31 points clear on 2nd-placed Lyon. This was the PSG era of Thiago Silva and David Luiz, Thiago Motta and Blaise Matuidi, spearheaded by Edinson Cavani and 38-goal, 13-assist Zlatan Ibrahimović.
Ibrahimović was ably supported by a peak-age Ángel Di María, who chipped in with 17 assists. Di María's assist rate of 0.73 per 90 has only been bettered on two occasions in the last eight seasons: Ousmane Dembélé with 0.77 for Barcelona in 2021/22, and Thomas Müller with 0.80 for Bayern Munich in 2019/20. His xG Assisted rate of 0.51 per 90 has only been bettered once: by himself in 2019/20.
Speaking of Ousmane Dembélé, this was the then-18 year old's breakout season with Rennes that earned him the reported-€15 million move to Borussia Dortmund in the summer of 2016. Dembélé registered a 12-goal, 5-assist season off the right of the Rennes attack, with only Sofiane Boufal and Hatem Ben Arfa completing more dribbles than him over the season.
Elsewhere, there was the "streets won't forget" Monaco team that finished 3rd with a team stuffed full of wonderkids. Get a load of this lineup (Player, Age, League Minutes):
- Fabinho, 22, 3233
- Bernardo Silva, 21, 2372
- Thomas Lemar, 20, 1886
- Tiemoué Bakayoko, 21, 1444
- Kylian Mbappé, 17, 325
Yep, 325 minutes of Kylian Mbappé at the age of 16 and 17, in a dataset that includes his first Ligue 1 goal, one that made him the youngest goalscorer in Monaco's history at the age of 17 years and 62 days.
The Ligue 1 release is part 5/5 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
