 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Sports statistics |
| Founded | August 2004; 20 years ago (2004-08) |
| Founder | Sean Forman |
| Headquarters | , US |
| Products |
|
| Website | www |
Sports Reference, LLC is an Americansports statistics company that operates databases of several sports. They includePro Football Reference forAmerican football,Baseball Reference forbaseball,Basketball Reference forbasketball,Hockey Reference forice hockey,FBref forassociation football (soccer), and pages forcollege football andbasketball.[1][2] Sports Reference also operate the online sports trivia gameImmaculate Grid and the statistics-based subscription serviceStathead. From 2008 to 2020 the Web site includedOlympic Games statistics from the first Games to the most recent.
The company was founded inPhiladelphia by Sean Forman in 2004 and incorporated as Sports Reference LLC in 2007.[3][1][4] The company operates databases ofsports statistics for several sports. They includePro Football Reference forAmerican football,Baseball Reference forbaseball, Basketball Reference forbasketball, Hockey Reference forice hockey, FBref forassociation football (soccer), and pages forcollege football andbasketball. Sports Reference maintained a section on theOlympics from 2008 to 2020.[5] 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 theNational Football League (NFL) since1941.[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). Division I women's basketball stats were added in 2023.[6] Sports Reference purchased the baseball trivia gameImmaculate Grid on July 11, 2023, and integrated it with its sites.[7][8]
Sports Reference added a site forOlympic Games statistics and history in July 2008,[9][10] 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.[11] Data for the2016 Summer Olympics were added,[12] but the site was not updated for the2018 Winter Olympics.[13][11] Sports Reference closed its Olympic site on May 14, 2020.[14]
The providers of the Olympic data, known asOlyMADmen, launched a new site calledOlympedia in May 2020.[15][16][17][18] According toSlate, editing of "Olympedia [was] restricted to about two dozen trusted academics and researchers who specialize in Olympic history."[19] The site is owned by theInternational Olympic Committee (IOC).[20] On December 29, 2023, OlyMADmen memberBill 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.[21][22]
OlyMADmen, an international group of Olympics experts and historians, have made their exhaustive Olympics database available
the result many years of work by a group of Olympic historians and statisticians called the OlyMADmen
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.
Media related toSports Reference at Wikimedia Commons