How to add custom leagues#

SoccerData has built-in support to scrape data from the top-5 European leagues and the major international tournaments. The leagues available for each source can be listed with the available_leagues() class method.

import soccerdata as sd
sd.FBref.available_leagues()
>>> ['ENG-Premier League', 'ESP-La Liga', 'FRA-Ligue 1', 'GER-Bundesliga', 'ITA-Serie A']

This documentation explains how to add custom leagues.

Warning

Note that you might encounter errors when trying to scrape data for the leagues you added yourself. This is because the data provided for these leagues might have a different structure. If you encounter such an error, please do not open an issue on GitHub, but try to fix it yourself.

Adding a new league#

Additional leagues can configured in SOCCERDATA_DIR/config/league_dict.json. This file should contain a mapping between a generic name for the league and the identifier used internally by each data source (see below) that you want to support. For example, for the Dutch Eredivisie this would be:

{
  "NED-Eredivisie": {
    "ClubElo": "NED_1",
    "MatchHistory": "N1",
    "SoFIFA": "[Netherlands] Eredivisie",
    "FBref": "Eredivisie",
    "ESPN": "ned.1",
    "FiveThirtyEight": "eredivisie",
    "WhoScored": "Netherlands - Eredivisie",
    "season_start": "Aug",
    "season_end": "May"
  }
}

The season_end and season_start fields are optional. This should be the month in which the last game and first game of a season are played, respectively. If they are not provided, June is used as the last month of the season and July as the first one.

Now, restart your Python session and check whether it is added to available leagues by running the command below.

>>> import soccerdata as sd
>>> sd.FBref.available_leagues()
[..., 'NED-Eredivisie', ...]

Internal identifiers#

Below are instructions on how to find the internal identifiers for each data source.

ClubElo: The internal identifier has the format {country_code}_{level}. The get the country code, go to https://clubelo.com/, click on the league you want to add and take the three-letter code in the URL. For example, the URL for the Dutch Eredivisie is http://clubelo.com/NED which means that the country identifier is NED. The level is the number of the league, starting with 1 for the top league. The internal identifier for the Dutch Eredivisie is therefore NED_1.
MatchHistory: The internal identifier has the format {country_code}{level}. Download the CSV file corresponding corresponding to the league you would like to add from https://www.football-data.co.uk/data.php and take the value in the Div column.
SoFIFA: The internal identifier has the format [{region}] {league name}. Go to https://sofifa.com/api/league to get the list of available leagues. The {region} corresponds to the nationName field in the JSON response. The {league name} corresponds to the value field.
FBref: Go to https://fbref.com/en/comps/ and take the value in the Competition Name column.
ESPN: The internal identifier has the format {country_code}.{level}. Go to https://www.espn.com/soccer/competitions, click on the league you want to add and take the value in the URL after /league/_/name/.
FiveThirtyEight: Go to https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/soccer-predictions/, select the relevant league and take the value in the URL after /soccer-predictions/.
WhoScored: Go to https://www.whoscored.com and use the JavaScript console to get the value of the allRegions variable. The internal identifier has the format {region name} - {league name}.

Troubleshooting#

If you add a new league and it doesn’t show up in the list of available leagues, there are a few things you can do to debug the problem.

Make sure to reload the soccerdata module after you modify the league_dict.json file. The most straightforward way to do this is to restart your notebook or Python interpreter.

Check whether your league_dict.json file is at the correct location. If so, you should see this appear in the log messages when importing the soccerdata library.

>>> import soccerdata as sd
[11/25/22 11:49:12] INFO     Custom team name replacements loaded from <path>/teamname_replacements.json.                                                                                                _config.py:83
                    INFO     Custom league dict loaded from <path>/league_dict.json.                                                                                                                    _config.py:153

Check whether the content of your league_dict.json file is valid JSON. You can check the file’s syntax using Python’s built-in json.tool module.
```
$ cat config/league_dict.json | python -m json.tool
Expecting ',' delimiter: line 1 column 10 (char 9)
```