Welcome

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Welcome to SFC Statistics! This site opened today, and I thought I’d start by telling you a bit about it, including what you’ll find here and what’s coming in the future.

What’s different?

There are a lot of football statistics websites out there, and a few that focus exclusively on Australia or the A-League. SFC Statistics, as you might have guessed, focuses exclusively on Sydney FC.1

We aim to be the most comprehensive source of Sydney FC statistics and information on the web. I’ve been following Sydney FC from the start, and have been collecting match information the whole time.

As a result, even though it is 100% unofficial, I am pretty confident in the accuracy of the information presented on this site: I have either collected it personally2 or carefully verified it from multiple contemporary sources. There is only one competitive match for which I’m not sure that I have all of the substitutions, because this information was not made available anywhere that I could find at the time.3 If you spot an error on this site, please highlight the offending text and hit Ctrl+Enter to submit a report (or contact us through the main form).

Finally, I am a statistician by trade. What I do for work is actually quite different from this kind of sports stats, but it has given me experience in collecting, storing and summarising data. In the future, I plan to apply more sophisticated statistical methods to analyse trends in the SFC data.

What’s here?

I have been working on this website in one form or another for a very long time. What’s available at the moment is a long way short of what I had originally intended to be on the first live version, but it might’ve been another several years before I could get that done, so I’ve decided to reduce my own ambitions in order to make it publicly available sooner.

The main things that you’ll find at the moment are comprehensive details of all of Sydney FC’s competitive matches, a summary of player statistics (which can be filtered by season & competition) and manager results, for both the senior men’s and women’s teams.

As mentioned above, these are all things that you’d possibly be able to find on other websites. We also have competition tables with the ability to view the standings at the end of any match day during a season, a full listing of Sydney FC’s non-competitive matches, and comprehensive results of the SFCU player of the season voting.

What you won’t find

I don’t have in-game stats such as possession, shots and pass completions; that kind of stuff generally isn’t freely available. I also can’t promise that the stats here will always be perfectly up-to-date. The latest match included in the database is shown at the bottom of each page.

What’s coming

Plenty. The obvious thing missing at the moment is the ability to view an individual player’s profile, and this is next up on my priority list. A facility to perform a custom search for particular matches (e.g. wins by 2 or more goals in Victoria) is something I would love to add, but may be a bit of a longer time away.

I’ve painstakingly collected details on all goals4 scored in Sydney FC’s competitive matches, including things like the approximate location of the shot and how it was taken (e.g. left foot, right foot, header). These details will all be made available, as well as summaries of a particular player’s goals (did BobĂ´‘s goals come from a closer distance on average than Sasho Petrovski‘s?).

Another aspect will be this blog, in which I plan to dive deeper into interesting trends in the data, as well as analysing some other interesting football-related datasets that I’ve found along the way.

Want to help?

There is a huge number of other things on my ‘to do’ list, but I’m afraid I don’t have the same amount of free time I did a decade ago, and they may stay there forever (and become harder and harder to complete) unless I enlist some help.

I’ve made a wishlist of things that I’d love some help with, the main ones being youth team results, a gallery of our previous kits and updating a comprehensive Sydney FC history timeline5. The list is by no means exhaustive though, and if there are other things you think you could contribute, please get in touch.

As you may be able to tell6, I’m definitely not a professional web designer, so anyone who would like to lend their expertise in that domain is most welcome as well!

Enjoy!

Take a look around.

I welcome feedback on any aspect of the site: I can be contacted through the online form, by email (admin@sfcstatistics.com) or on Twitter (@SFC_Stats).

Footnotes

  1. While I have collated other A-League match results for the purposes of showing the league table, I haven’t collected anything beyond that, such as line-ups or goalscorers. If you’re looking for that, try one of the other sites.
  2. I’ve spent many cold nights in places such as Campbelltown, Sefton, Cromer, Kogarah and Leichhardt (and one very wet night in Belconnen), straining to read the tiny numbers on our trialists’ shorts as we made 8 substitutions in the 60th minute. The results are here.
  3. If you somehow have more information about this match, I’d be forever grateful! Please get in contact.
  4. Well, the ones that were available on video at least.
  5. Older SFCU forum members may remember the history ‘megapost’ I presented in 2008. I kept it updated until the end of the 2009-10 season, but I haven’t been able to do any more since then.
  6. Particularly if you have tried to view this site on a mobile!

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