Sports Data

The following lists publicly available data sources and R packages by sport. For a more comprehensive list, see this CRAN task view on sports analytics data.

Baseball

• Lahman package - collection of tables built using Sean Lahman’s historical database going back to 1871!.
• baseballr package by Bill Petti - provides access to data from FanGraphs.com, Baseball-Reference.com, along with pitch-level PITCHf/x and Statcast data from the Baseball Savant site.
• retro package by Ben Baumer - enables easy access to and creation of a Retrosheet database.
• statcastr package by Ben Baumer - enables easy creation of a Statcast database using [baseballr]

American football

• nflscrapR-data repository by Ron Yurko - repository of NFL play-by-play data from 2009 to 2019. This was constructed using the nflscrapR package which unfortunately is no longer able to scrape data due to changes made by the NFL. The data include advanced statistics generated by the nflscrapR expected points (EP) and win probability (WP) models.
• nflfastR-data repository by Sebastian Carl and Ben Baldwin - repository of NFL data going back to 2000! This was constructed using the nflfastR package and was heavily inspired by nflscrapR, including the use of the nflscrapR models for calculating EP and WP.
• cfbfastR by Saiem Gilani et al - R package to access to college football play-by-play data based on a wrapper around https://collegefootballdata.com/ while including EP and WP estimates. Its website contains an extensive number of examples. It’s the evolution of the previous cfbscrapR package by Meyappan Subbaiah et al.

Basketball

• ncaahoopr package by Luke Benz - provides access to men’s NCAA basketball play-by-play data, along with win probability estimates.
• wncaahoopR package by Seth Berry and Scott Nestler - inspired by ncaahoopr, this provides access to women’s NCAA basketball play-by-play data and other information.
• nbastatR package by Alex Bresler - comprehensive package for accessing NBA data such as play-by-play and shot locations.
• pyball python package by Patrick McFarlane - comprehensive python package for accessing both NBA and WNBA data similar to nbastatR.
• ballr package by Ryan Elmore - provides easy access to stats from basketball-reference.com.
• Eight Thirty Four by Udam Singh Saini - repository of readily available NBA play-by-play csv datasets, including files with information about players on court at the possession level.
• hoopr by Saiem Gilani - provides access to live play by play and box score data from ESPN with shot locations when available for men’s college and professional basketball.
• wehoop by Saiem Gilani and Geoff Hutchinson - R package for working with women’s college and professional basketball data, with functions to access live play by play and box score data from ESPN with shot locations when available.

Hockey

• nhlapi package by Jozef Hajnala - new package for accessing data from the open NHL API (looks promising!).
• nwhlR package by Jake Flancer - provides access to NWHL play-by-play data.
• elite package by Evan Oppenheimer - provides easy access to data from Elite Prospects.
• Evolving-Hockey scraper - R script for accessing NHL’s publicly available data (used in construction of Evolving-Hockey.com).
• Meta Hockey - various hockey data and coding resources.
• MoneyPuck - player, team, and shot-level data available to download going back to 2007.
• Big Data Cup 2021 sample - Stathletes-tracked junior hockey data from the Erie Otters and women’s hockey data from the Olympics and NCAA.
• And a variety of womens hockey data sources here from the organizers of WHKYHAC.

Soccer (football)

• nwslR package by Arielle Dror and Sophia Tannir - contains datasets and functions to access data from the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). Unfortunately its scraping functions do not appear to work anymore, but it still includes previously downloaded datasets.
• fcscrapR package by Ron Yurko - accesses ESPN’s commentary data for soccer matches (could use an update…)
• engsoccerdata package by James Curley - package includes complete datasets for English and European soccer leagues.
• StatsBomb Open Data - free sample StatsBomb to use (under terms and conditions) with player locations on shot attempts and passes, along with detailed defensive information.
• International football results from 1872 to 2020 by Mart Jürisoo - Kaggle dataset with results for > 40,000 international football matches going back to 1872!
• American Soccer Analysis app - player and team level data for MLS, NWSL, and more American soccer leagues are available download for free!

More sports!

• sportyR - R package with plotting functions for a variety of sports and types of fields/courts.
• deuce package by Stephanie Kovalchik - provides easy access to professional tennis data from Jeff Sackmann’s data repositories.
• cricketdata package by Rob Hyndman - provides access to data from ESPNCricinfo.
• Cricsheet - ball-by-ball CSV data for men’s and women’s matches across tournaments and leagues (basically it’s Retrosheet for Cricket).
• World Championship Rowing Split Times and Strokes per Minute by Dani Chu - repository with CSV files for World Rowing Championship pacing profile project
• Chris Long’s repositories - an incredible number of different datasets for a variety of sports that I won’t attempt to summarize, feel free to dive in!
• ROpenDota - An R package that works as an API client for DOTA2 based on OpenDota.
• Kaggle eSports datasets - Kaggle seems to be the only location with publicly available eSports data.