Stats & analytics for sports betting

Why football stats help more than watching

You cannot watch forty matches in a weekend, but a football statistics website records all of them.

After one match you remember how a team looked. A stats page shows how often it scored, let in goals and kept a clean sheet (no goals against) in the last ten games. A side that played badly last week may still have twelve points from its last six matches. Another team may look dangerous and still score in only half of its home games.

Nobody can read the winner from a table. What you get is how often something happened, and you compare that with the price the bookmaker offers.

Which football statistics matter for betting

• Team form over the last five to ten matches. A squad in December is often not the squad from August, so the whole season is less useful.
• Home and away stats, because some teams take two thirds of their points at home.
• Goals scored and conceded per game. For a total, average the home side's goals scored with the away side's goals conceded. Do the same the other way round, then add the two results.
• Clean sheet and both teams to score (BTTS) rates.
• Expected goals, or xG. Every shot gets a value between 0 and 1, based on how often similar shots are scored. A shot from one metre into an empty goal can be worth about 0.7, and a shot from thirty metres about 0.03. Add up a team's shots and you get its match xG. Our xG guide starts from zero.
• Head to head (H2H) stats. Treat old meetings with care: a game from three seasons ago had different players and often a different manager. Our head-to-head stats guide shows how one record can give three different answers.

For card stats, count cards and fouls per minute played. A per-match count treats a substitute who played twelve minutes the same as a defender who played ninety.

Corner stats are harder to get for free. Live apps show the corner count during a match, and FootyStats has season corner tables in its paid Premium plan.

What do you do with a percentage? Turn it into a price with an odds converter, then check what the bookmakers offer.

Four kinds of football stats sites

Football stats sites (soccer stats sites in American English) fall into four groups.

Live score apps. Sofascore and FotMob show live stats during and after a match: shot maps, player stats and ratings, a chart of which team is attacking, and xG on the bigger competitions. FotMob gives an xG value for every shot. Sofascore covers more than 20 sports, and FotMob only football. Flashscore covers 35 sports and lists every player's xG in one table. It also showed xG on a Bolivian league match, where FotMob had none.

xG databases. Understat has free xG for six leagues: the Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and the Russian Premier League. Seasons go back to 2014/15, and every table has a CSV export. WhoScored is best known for player ratings. Its match page has no xG, while its league pages hold a full season xG table.

Football betting stats and predictions. FootyStats lists how often teams hit markets such as over 2.5 goals and BTTS. In our test a guest could open about four match pages before the site locked them for four hours. Forebet gives a win, draw and loss percentage for matches in more than 850 football leagues, free and with no account. Its match pages also show form and head-to-head records.

Results archives. FBref covers more than 100 men's and women's competitions, with results, team stats, shots, cards, goalkeeper saves, penalties and referee stats. It also keeps a head-to-head page for every pair of clubs. Soccerway has results that go back to the 1970s and lists missing players before each match. Since 2025 it runs on Flashscore's system and shows the same numbers, so count the two as one source.

We opened the same match on every site we reviewed and put the results side by side.

On one La Liga match, Sofascore, FotMob and Flashscore gave both teams exactly the same xG. Understat gave the same 16 shots a higher total.

Free xG stats: whose model you see

Most big stats sites do not count the shots themselves. They buy match data from Opta, a company owned by Stats Perform.

FotMob, WhoScored and Flashscore all name Opta as their source. Sofascore does not name its source. On the La Liga match we tested, its xG was the same as FotMob's to two decimal places, for both teams. So Sofascore very likely shows Opta data too, at least on the bigger competitions.

Understat runs its own model, built on more than 100,000 shots according to its home page, and its total for the same shots was higher. FootyStats uses its own xG formula. FBref has shown no xG since January 2026.

Even two Opta sites can disagree on a season total: WhoScored's season table did not always match the sum of the match figures on Sofascore or FotMob.

A rule such as "bet over when both teams average 1.5 xG" built on Understat will give different bets on FotMob. Pick one source for each number and use it every time.

Free xG stats also stop somewhere:

• Understat: its six leagues only.
• Sofascore and FotMob: top leagues, big cups and many other competitions. Between them we saw xG for Brazil's Serie A, MLS, the Championship and the Eredivisie. Some national top leagues and small qualifying matches have none.
• Flashscore: it reached Bolivia's top division, a league FotMob left without xG. Soccerway shows the same data, and we found no match stats in Spain's fifth tier.
• Amateur matches on Sofascore that users enter themselves show no statistics tab at all.
• A full season of xG in one table: only Understat and WhoScored.

Many bettors look for weak prices in small leagues. For most of them there is no free xG, so open Flashscore first and check whether the match has a Stats tab.

What FBref lost in January 2026

On 20 January 2026 Stats Perform ended its data deal with Sports Reference, the company behind FBref. Expected goals, expected assists, most passing and pressing numbers and the scouting reports that ranked each player against others in his position were deleted.

Results, tables, home and away splits, shots and shots on target, cards, fouls, penalties, goalkeeper saves and referees stayed. So did the head-to-head pages, which are built from results. Many stats guides online still send readers to FBref for xG.

Our page on FBref alternatives shows where each lost number can be found now.

Free football stats and paid plans

Match xG on Sofascore, FotMob, Flashscore and Understat costs nothing, and so do results, form and head to head on FBref and Soccerway. The paid plans:

• Stathead, the search tool for FBref and four American sports sites: $9 a month for one sport or $16 for all five, $80 or $160 a year, first month free. Since January 2026 it searches basic stats only.
• WhoScored+ is a monthly plan with a 7-day trial and a list of bets that its model thinks are priced too high. The price depends on your country.
• Sofascore Plus removes ads, and Sofascore Pro adds AI Insights with win probabilities. Prices depend on your country.
• FotMob sells a version without ads.
• Flashscore sells an ad-free version only inside its iPhone app. The website has no way to pay for it.
• FootyStats Premium unlocks corner and card tables and lifts the limit on match pages.
• Understat and Forebet sell nothing. Forebet earns its money from ads.

When would you pay? A search tool helps if you run the same search every week, for example every away team that has not scored in three matches. The picks in WhoScored+ and Sofascore Pro come from a model, and neither site showed us a long public record for them.

Common mistakes with football betting stats

• Looking at three or four matches. About ten is a usable minimum, and a home and away split cuts that in half.
• Opening a page with ninety numbers. One of them will support the bet you already wanted.
• Using old data. Team news comes about an hour before kick-off and can move the price more than any season average.
• Mixing sources, the xG problem above. Flashscore and Soccerway are one source, not two.
• Trusting an H2H tab as it stands. On Soccerway, the H2H list of a finished match includes that match itself.
• Reading a prediction tab as a tip. On FootyStats we saw both teams in the same match marked "Good Bet? Yes".
• Following a prediction site's percentages. In our Forebet test, the same stake on every one of 2,699 predictions lost 6.1%, and draw picks lost 14.9%.
• Reading a player rating as a probability. An 8.7 on one site's scale cannot be turned into a price.
• Forgetting the price. A team that scores in 80% of its home games is only a bet at odds above 1.25.

Stats sites for tennis, basketball and more

Sofascore and Flashscore cover tennis, basketball, ice hockey and many other sports. Forebet also gives predictions for twelve sports besides football. FotMob, Understat, WhoScored and Soccerway are football only. FBref is football too, but the same company runs sites for American sports.

Recent form, a home and away split and more than ten matches help in any sport. The numbers to read are different, though. In tennis, look at first serve percentage, points won on serve and break points saved. In basketball, look at pace and points per attack, because a fast team can score more without playing better.

How we test football stats sites

We opened and used every service before writing about it, tested the free parts first and took prices from the service itself. If a site loses a feature, we update the review. The review cards above this text lead to each one.

For most pre-match checks we keep two tabs open: a live app for the last few matches and Understat or WhoScored for the season. Our 20-minute pre-match routine walks through it step by step, from form to a fair price.