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Sports Reference, LLC is an American company which operates several sports-related websites, including Sports-Reference.com, Baseball Reference for baseball, Basketball Reference for basketball, Hockey Reference for ice hockey, Pro Football Reference for American football, and FBref for association football (soccer).[1][2] They also operate a subscription based service for statistics, called Stathead. Between 2008 and 2020, Sports Reference also provided pages for the Olympic Games and its competitors.
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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | sports technology, data, and content |
| Founded | August 2004 |
| Founder | Sean Forman |
| Headquarters | , US |
| Products |
|
| Website | www |
The site also includes sections on college football and college basketball, and once included a section on the Olympics.[3] The sites attempt a comprehensive approach to sports data. For example, Baseball-Reference contains more than 100,000 box scores and Pro-Football-Reference contains data on every scoring play in the National Football League since 1941.[1] The college basketball section includes data on NCAA Division I men's basketball, with incomplete data going back as far as 1892—predating the first NCAA divisional split (1956) and the NCAA itself (1906), and only a year after the sport was invented. Division I women's basketball data was added in 2023, initially with full data dating back to the 2009–10 season. On February 15, 2024, Sports Reference announced that it had expanded its Division I women's basketball data set to include player and team statistics dating back to the 1987–88 season.[4]
The company, which is based in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, was founded as Sports Reference in 2004 and was incorporated as Sports Reference LLC in 2007.[5][1][6]
On July 11, 2023, the company purchased the baseball trivia game Immaculate Grid and integrated it with Baseball-Reference.[7][8] Subsequently, the game was expanded to cover Sports Reference's other sites.[9]
Sports Reference added a site for Olympic Games statistics and history in July 2008.[10][11]
The company announced in December 2016 that the Olympics site was to be shut down in the near future due to a change in its data licensing agreement.[12] Since that time, data for the 2016 Summer Olympics has been added,[13] but the site was not updated for the 2018 Winter Olympics.[14][12] Sports Reference closed its Olympic site on May 14, 2020.[15]
The providers of the Olympic data, known as OlyMADmen, launched a new site called Olympedia in May 2020.[16][17][18][19] According to Slate, editing of "Olympedia [was] restricted to about two dozen trusted academics and researchers who specialize in Olympic history."[20] The site is owned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).[21] On December 29, 2023, OlyMADmen member Bill Mallon announced that they would no longer be able to update Olympedia because the IOC declined to renew the contract necessary to permit them to do so.[22][23]
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