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 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. We started with the La Liga release last week. The Bundesliga, Serie A, and Ligue 1 releases will shortly follow throughout the summer. Today, it's the turn of the Premier League.
Competition_id = 2, season_id = 27
Yes, the 2015/16 season will forever be remembered for Leicester’s 5000/1 championship season: driven by the dilly-ding-dilly-dong of Claudio Ranieri’s bell and the brilliance of Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez, and N'Golo Kanté in particular.
Reigning champions Chelsea sacked José Mourinho in December with the team in 16th place in the Premier League. Eden Hazard, PFA Player of the Year from that title-winning season, didn’t score until April.
There was also Arsenal’s biggest title challenge for a long time, with the front line of Olivier Giroud, Alexis Sanchez, and Mesut Özil dovetailing wonderfully at times, with Özil racking up 19 assists.
Elsewhere, there was Jürgen Klopp's appointment at Liverpool, the enigma of Dimitri Payet in West Ham’s final season at Upton Park, a 20-year-old Dele Alli having a 10 goal + 8 assist season to win PFA Young Player of the Year, and Southampton finishing 6th under Ronald Koeman.
The Premier League release is part 2/5 of the Big 5 Leagues data release. La Liga was part 1, the rest will follow over the summer. 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 one more week…
Best of luck,
The StatsBomb Team
