Fantasy Football fans' nightmare comes true as sudden U-turn sees 'FPL cheat code' pulled

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Unless you belong to certain corners of the football internet, this week’s announcement from data site FBref might not have registered. If you do belong to that group, though, it might have felt as though the sky was falling.

FBref has, for years, provided analysts, Fantasy Premier League (FPL) players and even just fans with easy access to in-depth statistics, such as expected goals, across a number of top football leagues, pulling its data from sports analytics company Opta. Pretty much overnight, though, that depth of coverage was gone.

“At Sports Reference we have taken great pride in the role FBref has played over the last seven years as an expansive source for soccer fans all over the world ,” a blog post shared on Tuesday read.

“Unfortunately, last week the provider of our advanced soccer data sent us a letter terminating our access to their data feeds and requiring the deletion of their data from the site immediately. As a result, we have removed the provider's data from FBref and Stathead in compliance with their demand.”

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If you checked social media as the news broke, you’ll have seen a number of posts of a similar flavour. A realisation of what FBref no longer providing detailed data from Opta and a recognition of what that might mean going forward - especially for the FPL community.

“Maybe someday we will have more but for now I’m just bummed,” Scott Willis of stats-led website Cannon Stats wrote on social media. “That was a great resource for people who loved the game.”

On Wednesday morning, reports of Bournemouth's move for Brazilian player Rayan came to light. “Normally, I’d go straight to FBref to check his historic underlying data,” football YouTuber FPL Pricey said, alongside a single tear emoji.

FBref was one of just a number of resources used by FPL players but it was one which provided sophisticated data in an easy-to-use format - almost a cheat code for some, albeit one which required work of their own. For some people, this was where you went to look at a striker’s underlying numbers to determine if they could continue their scoring form or were just on an unsustainable hot streak, or to compare two defenders to make an informed decision on which to bring in after another of your picks sustained a long-term injury.

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Mike Goodman, senior editor for soccer at CBS Sports and co-host of football analytics podcast The Double Pivot , remembers a time before FBref had this data. Goodman, who has had professional involvement with both FBref itself and its former data provider StatsBomb, explains how things were very different as recently as a decade ago.

“I have been doing this long enough that I started before FBref existed as an advanced data place,” Goodman told The Mirror . “If you wanted to work in public and you were a hobbyist [it] involved figuring out how to get data, what data existed in public and where. And a lot of what you could do was bounded by the data you get your hands on.

“A lot of what drove work and creativity was 'this is the data I have, what can I do with it?' FBref really, for anybody working without institutional backing, just expanded the bounds of what you could do in significant ways.”

In the years since, more mainstream outlets have been able to catch up. The concept of seeing xG on Match of the Day or during live match coverage would have felt alien not that long ago but there’s an argument that FBref and other sources played a part in bringing such information into the public eye more directly.

There has been speculation about Opta’s motivations for removing its advanced data from FBref. However, some observers have spotted the announcement - also this week - that FIFA has chosen Opta owner Stats Perform as its “first official worldwide betting data and betting streaming rights distributor” and put two and two together.

“I wonder if other sites will also be affected?” one commenter on Reddit asked. “The way that update is worded makes it sound like Opta are changing how their data gets used, and I'm sure several sites have had their access rights changed too.”

Holly Shand, an FPL content creator who works for the Fantasy Football Hub platform, uses Opta data to help with modelling and predictions in the free game. While she recognises there may be some immediate impact, explaining some FPL players have been reluctant to pay for specialist sites when they can access FBref data for free, she also recognises how widespread certain data has become when it comes to the public domain.

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“[As] FPL content creators, we're using a lot of stuff from the FPL site in a lot of our content, pulling things out,” Shand says. “But I always feel like that sits in the place of, well, as a content creator for FPL we're kind of advertising their product by taking some of their product to use in our content so I don't know how that fits with Opta.

“Obviously, there's lots of questions that have been thrown up but I think at some point the crossover's condoned. And it's only when someone starts to take liberties or, you know, are increasingly using it to drive profits for themselves which don't really relate to it.”

Shand has also worked on developing her own model to map player form charts, while using Opta data within her Fantasy Football Hub role. While she talks up the value in creating models tailored to FPL specifically - for example, qualities which are valuable for a Premier League player in FPL terms won’t always be the same as those which real-life managers and recruitment departments are looking for - she recognises these models still need inputs.

FPL players aren’t the only ones impacted. Grace Robertson, a journalist who has used FBref data to inform her football newsletter , was essentially blindsided by the news to the point that it may force a change in approach.

“I was a little shocked. I think it probably means I’ll use less data in my work going forward,” she says. “If the providers want to make it more and more difficult to access the information without paying a fortune, it just makes it harder to talk about football using analytics.”

Robertson previously had access to StatsBomb data when writing for that organisation but says she has used FBref more or less since it launched. “I think FBRef has always been the best at laying things out in a clean and easy way,” she says.

“A lot of other sites with this kind of data make it very difficult to get granular and find exactly what you’re looking for. FBRef has been the leader at making everything available right there, in a way that makes sense.”

The extent to which FBref will be missed may well depend on what comes in to fill the gap it has left behind. The ‘advanced’ data it provided still has a place in how we talk about football on TV and in written media, and even on games like EA FC, where post-match stats include expected goals.

We may get an idea of what the future looks like in the summer when we see the fruits of Opta and FIFA’s exclusive World Cup 2026 deal. For example, how much of it will be kept behind closed doors for the purposes of the betting data agreement and how much will be out in the open during broadcast coverage of the tournament.

“It costs money to produce these stats. It really does. And so how the stat companies make money is its own question,” Goodman adds.

“How a public facing company can afford to buy the stats and then provide them is a complicated question. All of these things are hurdles that need to be cleared in the process of providing data to a public.

“I'm not privy to any of how these decisions were reached, but I certainly understand why being in business with gambling and FIFA is good business for Opta. I certainly understand the struggles of being able to afford data if your model is providing it publicly. It's difficult.

“But I think that fans lose out in the long run, right? Like, fans who want to consume this stuff are the ones who end up sort of without a place to go to look and to learn and to be involved.”

This, at its heart, may be why there’s been such a visceral reaction in specific communities even as the news barely registers elsewhere. Some football fans will consume the game without the need for any deeper looks at the underlying data, focusing instead on narratives and the emotional pull of the sport, but others will feel the numbers accentuate all of that.

In some ways, there’s a concern that the democratisation of the data and the resulting mainstream pick-up may have created a new problem while solving an old one. As Robertson suggests: “If Opta know they can charge a fortune to major media companies for the data, they’re not going to want to let the average fan easily view it all for free.” And there’s no reason to think Opta would be alone in this regard.

As Goodman adds: “A lot of stuff that has become mainstream and how you consume the sport in the last 10 years, FBRef has come to be at the centre of, and it's now just overnight it's gone. So it's those fans who suffer.

“There's fans who are involved in statistics in a more robust way, whether it's it's through gambling or just through sort of hobbydom, who do more robust studies, modelling, what have you. And they're also going to be pretty, pretty heavily impacted. But it's really just anybody who wants to look at the numbers around soccer and who feels that that makes them a more informed fan, that loses out.”

Mirror Football has contacted Opta for comment.

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