The Cups Come Home

When the continental cups went live, I called it a down payment and promised the rest of the bill was coming: more domestic cups, more domestic leagues. Here's the first half of that, and it's a big one.

The national knockouts are in. Twenty-five of them, across eleven countries — the FA Cup and the Copa del Rey, the DFB Pokal and the Coppa Italia, the Super Cups that open a season and the curtain-raisers nobody quite agrees on the name for. These are the competitions where a third-division side occasionally walks into a giant's stadium and walks out with the tie, and where the league table means nothing for ninety minutes.

Every cup now on the site

Grouped by country. Each one links straight to its recent games:

England

Germany

France

Italy

Netherlands

Scotland

Spain

Turkey

Belgium

Portugal

Greece

A small change to how you browse

Adding cups meant rethinking one thing. Until now, you picked one kind of competition at a time — a domestic league, or national teams, or one of the new continental cups. That was fine when everything lived in its own lane.

Cups don't live in their own lane. A club plays its league and its domestic cup and, if it's good enough, a continental one — all in the same season, often in the same week. Forcing you to look at those one silo at a time made no sense.

So the competition picker is now multi-select. You can tick a domestic league and its cups together, or line up all four types at once — leagues, national teams, domestic cups, continental cups — and see the whole picture in one view. Pick as few or as many as you like. One is still perfectly valid; four is now on the table too.

One honest warning: streaks

Here's the part I'd rather tell you up front than have you discover on your own.

The streak tools were built on a quiet assumption: that a team plays one competition, and its matches form a single, tidy line you can read front to back. "Five unbeaten" meant five in a row, no ambiguity.

Cups break that assumption. A team can now be in several competitions at once, which means its matches no longer form one neat sequence — a league game, then a cup tie three days later, then back to the league.

Here's the key thing to understand: a streak now counts across every competition type you've selected, blended together in date order. Tick the league on its own and you get the old, familiar league-only streak. Tick the league and the domestic cup and you get one combined streak that treats a cup tie exactly like a league game — a defeat in the cup will end a run that the league table alone would show as unbroken. Add the continental cup on top and those results fold in too. The streak always reflects the whole selection, not each competition side by side.

That's deliberate — "unbeaten across everything they played" is a real, useful question. But it does mean the number you see depends entirely on which boxes are ticked, and the same team can show two very different streaks depending on whether you're looking at just its league or at all its football at once. Worth keeping in mind before you read too much into a figure.

I've tested this, and a handful of dedicated users have been putting it through its paces with me for a while now. It works — but "a team in multiple competitions at the same time" is a new shape for these tools, and I'd be lying if I said I was certain every edge case is caught. Some streaks, in some combinations, may still behave in ways I haven't anticipated.

So: if you spot a streak that looks wrong — one that counts something it shouldn't, or breaks where it shouldn't — please tell me. A quick note to SmartSoccerStats@gmail.com with what you picked and what looked off is exactly the kind of thing that lets me fix it. You're some of the best testers I've got.

That caveat aside — the cups are in, the picker is more flexible than it's ever been, and there's still more domestic football on the way. Go find a giant-killing. See you in the data.