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Sports Reference

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Sports Reference
Company typePrivate
Industrysports technology, data, and content
Predecessor
FoundedAugust 2004; 20 years ago (2004-08)
FounderSean Forman
Headquarters,
US
Products
  • Baseball Reference
  • Basketball Reference
  • Pro Football Reference
  • Hockey Reference
  • FBref
  • SR/College Basketball
  • SR/College Football
  • Stathead
Websitewww.sports-reference.com Edit this at Wikidata

Sports Reference, LLC is an American company which operates several sports-related websites, including Sports-Reference.com, Baseball-Reference.com for baseball, Basketball-Reference.com for basketball, Hockey-Reference.com for ice hockey, Pro-Football-Reference.com for American football, and FBref.com for association football (soccer).[1][2] They also operate a subscription based service for statistics, called Stathead. Between 2008 and 2020, Sports Reference also provided pages for the Olympic Games and its competitors.

Description

The site also includes sections on college football and college basketball, and once included a section on the Olympics.[3] The sites attempt a comprehensive approach to sports data. For example, Baseball-Reference contains more than 100,000 box scores and Pro-Football-Reference contains data on every scoring play in the National Football League since 1941.[1] 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), and only a year after the sport was invented. Division I women's basketball data was added in 2023, initially with full data dating back to the 2009–10 season.

The company, which is based in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, was founded as Sports Reference in 2004 and was incorporated as Sports Reference LLC in 2007.[4][1][5]

Olympics

Sports Reference Olympics logo

Sports Reference added a site for Olympic Games statistics and history in July 2008.[6][7]

The company announced in December 2016 that the Olympics site was to be shut down in the near future due to a change in its data licensing agreement.[8] Since that time, data for the 2016 Summer Olympics has been added,[9] but the site was not updated for the 2018 Winter Olympics.[10][8] Sports Reference closed its Olympic site on May 14, 2020.[11]

The providers of the Olympic data, known as OlyMADmen, launched a new site called Olympedia in May 2020.[12][13][14][15] According to Slate, editing of "Olympedia is restricted to about two dozen trusted academics and researchers who specialize in Olympic history."[16]

References

  1. ^ a b c Kramer, Staci D. (February 17, 2009). "Fantasy Sports Ventures Takes Minority Stake In Sports Reference LLC". CBS News. PaidContent.org. Retrieved September 24, 2021.
  2. ^ Fisher, Eric (February 16, 2009). "FSV buys stake in reference sites". Sports Business Journal. Archived from the original on February 17, 2009.
  3. ^ "Sports Reference Main Page". Sports-Reference.com. Archived from the original on February 1, 2010. Retrieved April 2, 2014.
  4. ^ Wagner, James (February 13, 2019). "From a Church in Philadelphia, Sports Reference Informs the World". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 14, 2019. Retrieved February 14, 2019.
  5. ^ "Company Overview of Sports Reference, LLC". Bloomberg Businessweek. Archived from the original on October 6, 2015. Retrieved November 8, 2013.
  6. ^ "Olympics at Sports Reference Launches". Sports-Reference.com. July 9, 2008. Archived from the original on July 26, 2008.
  7. ^ "About SR/Olympics". Sports-Reference.com. Archived from the original on July 29, 2008. Retrieved July 20, 2018.
  8. ^ a b "We'll Be Closing Soon". Sports-Reference.com. Archived from the original on December 19, 2016. Retrieved November 13, 2017.
  9. ^ "2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Games". Sports-Reference. Archived from the original on July 20, 2018. Retrieved July 20, 2018.
  10. ^ "Winter Games Index". Sports-Reference.com. Archived from the original on July 7, 2008. Retrieved July 20, 2018.
  11. ^ "Site is Closed". Sports-Reference.com. Retrieved May 15, 2020.
  12. ^ Lohn, John (May 27, 2020). "Comprehensive Olympedia Database Available to Public; Loaded with Information". Swimming World. Retrieved September 24, 2021. OlyMADmen, an international group of Olympics experts and historians, have made their exhaustive Olympics database available
  13. ^ Perelman, Rich (May 27, 2020). "LANE ONE: Staggering, brilliant, astonishing portal to Olympic history opens with debut of Olympedia.org". The Sports Examiner. Retrieved September 26, 2021.
  14. ^ Mallon, Bill (May 27, 2020). "Olympedia now open to the public". OlympStats.com. Retrieved May 27, 2020. the result many years of work by a group of Olympic historians and statisticians called the OlyMADmen
  15. ^ "About". Olympedia.org. Archived from the original on June 14, 2020. The group that has compiled the database refers to itself as MADmen — MAD being an acronym for several of the early members of the group, but also signifies their commitment to the project in another sense.
  16. ^ Harrison, Stephen (July 26, 2021). "How to Use Wikipedia When You're Watching the Olympics". Slate. Retrieved July 29, 2021.