Building the world's largest football database — Q1 2026 update.
This post is preserved as written, but several things it celebrates have since changed:
Injury data and player market values were withdrawn on 28 July 2026. We could not stand behind our right to redistribute them, so they no longer exist in the database — the "fully integrated" injury data below is gone.
xG is held, not served. The advanced-stats integration below is real, but shot-level data — including every xG field — is not currently served through the API at any tier.
The licence gate was enforced on 29 July 2026. Every tier, Enterprise included, now reads only the defensible set — rows we hold an explicit right to redistribute. Standings, announced below as a new endpoint, do not currently pass it and are served to no tier; neither do transfers.
Welcome to our Q1 2026 update on the development of foot.io, the world's largest football database! It's been a busy quarter, filled with significant improvements to our data coverage, infrastructure, and API.
Key highlights
- Expanded Data Coverage: We've continued our relentless pursuit of comprehensive football data. This quarter saw significant additions for leagues in South America, including expanded coverage of Argentinian and Brazilian competitions. We've also made strides in improving data quality for leagues in Asia, particularly in Japan and South Korea.
- Advanced Stats Integration: Following the work completed in late 2025, we've fully integrated advanced statistics like Expected Goals (xG) and injury data. This provides users with a deeper understanding of match dynamics and team performance. (See the correction note above: injuries have since been withdrawn, and xG is held but not served.)
- Wikidata Linking: We've begun linking our data to Wikidata, enhancing the semantic richness of our database and enabling more sophisticated queries and integrations.
- FBref Data Integration: We've significantly expanded our integration with FBref, bringing in a wealth of historical statistics and player data.
- Infrastructure Improvements: We've upgraded our database infrastructure to handle the increasing volume of data and user requests. This includes optimizations to our data ingestion pipelines and query performance.
- API Enhancements: We've released several new API endpoints, including one for retrieving venue details and another for accessing historical standings data. (See the correction note above: standings do not currently pass the licence gate.)
Technical deep dive
This quarter, we focused on improving the robustness and scalability of our data ingestion pipelines. We've implemented more sophisticated error handling and retry mechanisms to ensure data consistency. The recent addition of the venues table has been a significant undertaking, requiring careful mapping and validation of venue data from various sources. We've also made improvements to our backfill processes to handle missing season data more effectively.
Looking ahead
- Real-time Data: Our top priority for Q2 2026 is to introduce real-time match data. This will involve integrating with live data providers and building a robust streaming architecture.
- Player Attributes: We plan to expand our coverage of player attributes, including physical characteristics, skill ratings, and preferred playing positions.
- Community Contributions: We're exploring ways to enable community contributions to our database, allowing users to help improve data quality and expand coverage.
- Improved Data Quality Checks: We will be implementing more rigorous data quality checks throughout the ingestion process.
We're incredibly excited about the progress we've made and the future of foot.io. Thank you for your continued support!