Pick Several Leagues at Once — and Filter by Country

A reader wrote in with a simple complaint, and simple complaints are usually the best ones: why can I only look at one league at a time, or at all of them?

Fair. There was nothing in between. If you wanted the Premier League and La Liga side by side — the two biggest leagues in Europe, played on the same weekends — your options were to pick one, or to pick none and drown in eighty-six competitions. So that's what changed this week.

The league picker is multi-select

Tick as many leagues as you like. The filter panel on Recent Games, Game Statistics, Streak Explorer and Head to Head now lets you build the exact set you care about instead of choosing between one and everything.

A few that I keep going back to:

• England and Spain together — the two leagues everyone argues about, in one list
• The four biggest continental leagues — England, Spain, Italy, Germany
• Every English tier the site covers — from the Premier League down

Leave it empty and nothing changes from before: you get everything the rest of your filters allow.

New: filter by country

Above the leagues there's now a Country picker, and it does exactly what you'd hope. Choose Spain and the leagues list shrinks to Spanish football; choose Spain and Italy and you get both. If you don't then pick a specific league, the results stay scoped to those countries anyway — so "everything Scotland played last month" is two clicks, not twelve.

• Scotland, leagues and cups
• Germany and Italy, every league tier
• Spain's longest unbeaten runs

One thing worth knowing, because it surprised me while building it: a country selection is absolute. The Champions League doesn't belong to a country, so while a country is selected, competitions without one — the continental cups, national-team tournaments — drop out of the list entirely. That's the honest behaviour: if the leagues dropdown won't show them to you, the results shouldn't quietly include them either. Clear the country and they're back.

The competition picker is now a dropdown too

The four buttons — domestic leagues, national teams, domestic cups, international competitions — have become a dropdown that matches the two pickers below it. Same shape, same behaviour, same "empty means all" rule. It's a small thing, but three controls stacked on top of each other should look and work like siblings, and until now the top one was the odd one out.

The bigger change is the starting point. It used to open on domestic leagues only. It now opens on everything — leagues, cups, national teams and continental competitions all in play from the first second. The old default made sense when domestic leagues were all this site had. They aren't anymore, and a filter that hides three quarters of the data by default is a filter working against you.

If you liked the old behaviour, it's one click away, and it lives in the URL like every other filter: domestic leagues only.

Your old links still work

Every link you've saved or shared — from this blog, from a bookmark, from a message to a friend — still resolves to the same games. The URL didn't change shape; it just learned to hold more than one value. ?leagueId=39 is now read as a one-item list, and ?leagueId=39,140 is the new form. Nothing you saved has rotted.

Keep them coming

This is another feature that started as a note from someone using the site rather than an item on my own list, and those keep turning out to be the better ideas. If something here is awkward, missing, or just slower than it should be, SmartSoccerStats@gmail.com reaches me and I read all of it.

Go build a strange combination of leagues and see what falls out. See you in the data.