In this post I'll review some of the most common sites where you can find statistics about football. I'll concentrate primarily
on those sites where you can find stats that are useful for betting rather than answering "who was top scorer for Accrington Stanley
in 1978". There's a place for the latter but not really my need or focus.
If you google "football stats" you will get page after page of results and there seems to be hundreds of sites avaialble so it
can be quite tricky to find what you need. Below I comment on the some of the major sites.
Futstats.net
Futstats.net is the site I'm using at the moment primarily because it has both stats and a bet tracker. It
has a nice modern layout and is easy to navigate. It also has a sidebar to view a quick summary of stats.
It has a built in finder which can be used to search fixtures that match your chosen criteria. e.g. "show me all the upcoming
matches where home team has scored in the last five matches".
Two features that really standout are the aggregation of stats over multipe seasons and the ability to change layouts.
The stats come aggrgated for the current season as you would expect but are also aggregated to show the last 5, 10, and 20 matches plus the
"current & previous sesason" and the "current & previous 2 seasons". This is handy to get a longer view back.
Secondly, you can actually change the layouts - i.e. design your own pages with just the statistics you want to see. Even
better, you can define strategies that then use specific layouts so can easily switch between them.
They have an offer at the moment so is 3-5 usd per month depending on the functionality required.
One of the limitations is that you have to log in to access all the leagues and they don't have as many leagues availble as some
of the other options.
SoccerStats.com
SoccerStats.com is a nice option and has penty of leagues. It has lots of adverts but there is an ad free version for 5 Euros per month.
The site has lots of stats so you will be able to get pretty much anything you need but it can be quite cumbersome to navigate
as all the stats seem to be lumped together on one page a little bit randomly and the design is a little dated.
As mentioned before it does have all the stats you'd need and has separate pages for some of the stats for easy comparison
across teams and leagues.
FootyStats.org
FootyStats.org is a nice site. It's got loads of leagues and has a nice modern design. The
layouts are good - showing you side-by-side stats for each team for a given match. There are ads but they are not too intrusive.
For the free version some of the stats are locked and not accessible without a subscription. I think you can only view stats for
a certain number of matches per day. The downside here is that the premium offering is 20GBP per month which is quite steep.
It's a great site if you just want to hop on and look at the basic stats for one or two matches.
FBRef.com
FBRef.com looks old skool. No fuss and no frills - just plenty of tabulated data. Have to respect this approach. It somewhat feels like it is designed more to be for reference for specific stats rather than wanting to get a quick summary of stats that you can use for betting. Despite the simple layout I found it quite tricky to get a quick summary of stats for the match a selected match. Footystats is perhaps the best in this regard.
CGMBet
CGMBet is a desktop Windows app which allows you to download data to the app and then review
the data and analyse it. It does also have a live stats section which is good. It has lots of features and feels like a Microsoft Access database.
It seems very powerful and really enables you to dig down into lots of the stats - even to the extent of getting stats for
specific points in a match given a situation e.g. "if X side is winning 2-1 what is the % chance side Y will score". Similar to some
of the stats you get on TV occassionally.
It seems a bit dated now and the user interface is a little confusing. This is one for serious statoids who can overcome these limitations.
I have a copy and did use it when I dabbled in trading, although I found myself just going to the web anyway for some stats as it
was much quicker. It is a one-off payment of 130 euros which is pretty good if it is something you are going to use for many years.