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The Statistics I Said I Wasn't Adding

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A week ago I wrote that deeper statistics were waiting their turn, behind accounts, because doing player and coach data properly would swallow months. That's still true. This post is about something else I found while looking.

I went digging through the Games table to check what the filter panel was actually offering you, and the answer was: about half of it. Possession, saves, total and accurate passes, and a full shot breakdown — blocked, inside the box, outside the box — have been arriving with every import for months. They were stored, indexed, and shown to precisely nobody. The columns existed and the site never once mentioned them.

So I've walked back what I said, a little. Not on player data — that's still a months-long job and I'm not rushing it. But surfacing statistics that were already sitting there turned out to be a few days of work rather than a quarter, and it widens what you can ask of the site in a way that felt too obvious to leave alone. The honest version of the roadmap is: the big fork hasn't moved, but there was a shortcut sitting in plain sight and I took it.

What's new to filter on

The panel has gone from six sections to eight, and roughly doubled in what it covers.

Possession & Passing is entirely new. Ball possession, total passes, accurate passes and pass accuracy, each available for the match or for one side:

Cards got its own section, split by colour and by side. That distinction matters more than it sounds, and I'll come back to why.

Half-Time is new as a section too, and it does more than show you the break score. First-half goals, second-half goals, who was leading at the interval — and the comeback filters have moved here, where they belong:

Goals & Scoring picked up both-teams-scored and a winning-margin range — the two things I found myself wanting most often and couldn't express:

And Shots & Accuracy absorbed goalkeeper saves, which is where they always belonged — a save is the other half of a shot.

Home and away, on everything

This one came from a reader, and it's the change that quietly does the most work. Every countable statistic in the panel now has a home and an away variant alongside the match total. Goals, shots, shots on target, shot accuracy, saves, corners, fouls, cards, possession, passes, pass accuracy — all three of them, every time.

The totals answered "was this a wild game?" The splits answer "who made it wild?", which is usually the question underneath. A match with 26 shots is interesting; a match where one side had 22 of them is a story.

Sorting, at last

Also from a reader, and overdue: results are no longer stuck in date order. There's a Sort by control above the list — date, total goals, total shots, total corners or total cards, ascending or descending — and it's part of the URL like everything else, so a sorted view is as shareable as a filtered one.

Reset one section, not the lot

A third reader suggestion, and my favourite kind: small, obvious in hindsight, and mildly embarrassing that it wasn't already there.

The single Reset Filter button at the bottom is gone. Each section now has its own reset in its header, appearing only when that section actually holds something, with a small dot marking any collapsed section that's still filtering. Spent five minutes building a card filter and want to try a different date range without losing it? Reset just the dates.

While I was in there, the number boxes got fixed too. Type a negative and it becomes zero. Put 10 in Min and 2 in Max and they swap themselves when you click away, rather than silently returning nothing.

Every filter now shows up in the match

Open any result and the expanded panel mirrors the filter panel section for section — Shots & Accuracy, Corners & Fouls, Cards, Possession & Passing, Half-Time. Possession, saves, passes, pass accuracy and the shot breakdown all appear there for the first time, and the summary line carries the margin, both- teams-scored and the new totals.

The rule I held myself to: if you can filter on it, you can see it. Filtering by a number you can't then find in the result is a small betrayal, and there were a few of those.

One thing worth knowing

Here's the part that will occasionally surprise you, so I'd rather say it plainly than let you discover it: a missing value excludes a match from a range filter rather than counting as zero.

The score, the date and the competition exist for every match in the archive. Almost nothing else does. Detailed statistics are recorded mainly for more recent seasons and larger competitions, and possession and passing are the thinnest of the lot. So a filter for "at most 2 corners" returns matches we know had at most two — not matches where nobody wrote the corners down.

Red cards are the sharpest example. They're logged far less often than yellows, which is why the card filters are split by colour: "at most 0 red cards" means "a match we know finished without one", and lumping that in with yellows would have quietly told you something false. It's also why a single filter can narrow your results harder than you expected. If a search comes back thin, the statistic you filtered on is usually the reason.

Both explorer pages now carry a short What the data covers note at the bottom explaining this, because it's the kind of thing that should be written down somewhere rather than learned by surprise.

Next week: streaks

Nothing revolutionary, but the Streak Explorer is next, and it's another one that arrived in my inbox rather than on my own list. It's about making the page easier to actually use rather than making it do more — and the moment it was suggested to me it read as obviously right, which is generally the sign of a good idea.

Three of the four changes in this post started as messages from people using the site. That ratio has held for months now, and it's not a coincidence — you spot the awkward parts far faster than I do, because I built them and stopped seeing them. If something here is clumsy, missing, or slower than it ought to be, SmartSoccerStats@gmail.com reaches me and I read all of it.

Go find out who actually had the ball. See you in the data.