Sports Reference, LLC is an American sports statistics company that operates databases of several sports. They include Pro Football Reference for

American football American football, referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada and also known as gridiron football, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular American football field, field with goalposts at e ...

, Baseball Reference for baseball, Basketball Reference for

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appro ...

, Hockey Reference for

ice hockey Ice hockey (or simply hockey in North America) is a team sport played on ice skates, usually on an Ice rink, ice skating rink with Ice hockey rink, lines and markings specific to the sport. It belongs to a family of sports called hockey. Tw ...

, FBref for

association football Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 Football player, players who almost exclusively use their feet to propel a Ball (association football), ball around a rectangular f ...

(soccer), and pages for

college football College football is gridiron football that is played by teams of amateur Student athlete, student-athletes at universities and colleges. It was through collegiate competition that gridiron football American football in the United States, firs ...

and

. Sports Reference also operate the online sports trivia game Immaculate Grid and the statistics-based subscription service Stathead. From 2008 to 2020 the website included

Olympic Games The modern Olympic Games (Olympics; ) are the world's preeminent international Olympic sports, sporting events. They feature summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a Multi-s ...

statistics from the first Games to the most recent.

History

The company was founded in

Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

by Sean Forman in 2004 and incorporated as Sports Reference LLC in 2007. The company operates databases of sports statistics for several sports. They include Pro Football Reference for

, Baseball Reference for baseball, Basketball Reference for

, Hockey Reference for

, FBref for

(soccer), and pages for

and

. Sports Reference maintained a section on the Olympics from 2008 to 2020. The sites attempt a comprehensive approach to sports data. For example, Baseball Reference contains more than 100,000 box scores while Pro Football Reference contains data on every scoring play in the National Football League (NFL) since . The college basketball section includes data on NCAA Division I men's basketball, with incomplete data going back as far as 1892—predating the first NCAA divisional split (1956) and the NCAA itself (1906). Division I women's basketball stats were added in 2023. Sports Reference purchased the baseball trivia game Immaculate Grid on July 11, 2023, and integrated it with its sites.

Olympics

Sports Reference added a site for

statistics and history in July 2008, including statistics from the first Games to the most recent. The company announced in December 2016 that the Olympics site was to shut down in the near future due to a change in its data licensing agreement. Data for the

2016 Summer Olympics The 2016 Summer Olympics (), officially the Games of the XXXI Olympiad () and officially branded as Rio 2016, were an international multi-sport event held from 5 to 21 August 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with preliminary events i ...

were added, but the site was not updated for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Sports Reference closed its Olympic site on May 14, 2020. The providers of the Olympic data, known as ''OlyMADmen'', launched a new site called Olympedia in May 2020. According to '' Slate'', editing of "Olympedia asrestricted to about two dozen trusted academics and researchers who specialize in Olympic history." The site is owned by the

International Olympic Committee The International Olympic Committee (IOC; , CIO) is the international, non-governmental, sports governing body of the modern Olympic Games. Founded in 1894 by Pierre de Coubertin and Demetrios Vikelas, it is based i ...

(IOC). On December 29, 2023, OlyMADmen member Bill Mallon announced that they would no longer be able to update Olympedia because the IOC declined to renew the contract necessary to permit them to do so.

References

External links

* *{{commonscatinline American sport websites Sports records and statistics Companies based in Philadelphia Privately held companies based in Pennsylvania American companies established in 2004 2004 establishments in Pennsylvania Data companies