Sources for Rugby Statistics

[Wilson]

I was wondering if anyone had any good sources for detailed rugby statistics?

For background - I work in software engineering, on data warehousing and analytics software in particular. I've been looking for a good source of data that I actually care about and have some opinions on how it should be used, that I can then us to produce analytics for testing and documentation. So figured some rugby stats would be perfect.

As far as the stats go I'm not picky. Historical would be fine for my purposes, if I can get current stats than even better. The biggest thing is to be able to get them in some sort of usable format, from a software perspective - a Database I can query, excel spreadsheets, etc.

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can offer.

 

[RebelYell]

I used to work in Rugby and lamented the lack of reliable game stats. I used http://www.itsrugby.fr/recherchejoueur.html to get game specific info, and it seemed very reliable

 

[RugbyReg]

what sort of stats?

 

[Wilson]

Honestly anything at this point if it's in a format I can use and there's a reasonable amount of it. Match stats would be ideal, but I'll take what I can get.

 

[Adam84]

data and statistics are a commodity I'm afraid, there is a lot been collected every game by broadcasters, teams and governing bodies but they aren't made publicly available

 

[liquor box]

On the Pick and Drive podcast they had Morgan Tirinui as a guest and asked him to propose to STAN/CH9 that they should have a stats site available to subscribers.

Tirinui had been speaking about his desire for STAN to use new stats that look for other performance benchmarks rather than standard ones that we are used to.

This would be awesome if it could become reality

 

[Jimmy_Crouch]

Opta

 

[Dan54]

On the Pick and Drive podcast they had Morgan Tirinui as a guest and asked him to propose to STAN/CH9 that they should have a stats site available to subscribers.

Tirinui had been speaking about his desire for STAN to use new stats that look for other performance benchmarks rather than standard ones that we are used to.

This would be awesome if it could become reality

Yep LB, I know on Breakdown last year for a while they had Tabai Matson explaining what stats etc that coaches actually use when reviewing games etc. As Turunui allauded to they are really bloody interesting, well for rugby people, things like passes made with a good and less so outcome, same as tackles, kicks etc etc. Not just what a player did, but if it was worthwhile I do know a couple of years back there was ons site that showed tackles as ones that were passive? and ones where they actually cpmpleted tackle from point of contact etc.

 

[liquor box]

Yep LB, I know on Breakdown last year for a while they had Tabai Matson explaining what stats etc that coaches actually use when reviewing games etc. As Turunui allauded to they are really bloody interesting, well for rugby people, things like passes made with a good and less so outcome, same as tackles, kicks etc etc. Not just what a player did, but if it was worthwhile I do know a couple of years back there was ons site that showed tackles as ones that were passive? and ones where they actually cpmpleted tackle from point of contact etc.

There are plenty of good stats in the NFL that would be interesting in Rugby.

Catches above expectation is a stat used in NFL to determine how good a receiver you are, if you catch balls that most would miss you are better than average and if you drop what you should catch you are below average.

This could easily be adjusted for ball retention in Rugby for catching passes or for ball retention. This could capture when a player just drops the ball with no pressure, or with pressure.

Average pocket time gives an indication of how quickly the quarterback gets rid of the ball, this could be used for the scrum half.

Distance after contact is also very applicable to Union.


I guess the biggest issue is the resources required to collect and collate the stats for every second of a game is massive for little return where as US sports have a long association with numbers and fantasy sports are very popular.

 

[zer0]

Fox Sports used to collect a bunch of player stats for their fantasy rugby thing. I used their numbers as a basis to get started on some work rate metrics adapted from the NBA. Given Fox has lost the broadcasting rights, I suspect the stats -- and, by extension, my stuff -- is kind of dead in the water.

The lack of sources for anything approaching useful is lame.

 

[KOB1987]

Fox Sports used to collect a bunch of player stats for their fantasy rugby thing. I used their numbers as a basis to get started on some work rate metrics adapted from the NBA. Given Fox has lost the broadcasting rights, I suspect the stats -- and, by extension, my stuff -- is kind of dead in the water.

The lack of sources for anything approaching useful is lame.

Fantasy Rugby Draft would have pretty much the same stats, they were all sourced from Opta I think

 

[Adam84]

Stan have posted some really interesting stats from time to time, so it suggests the data is been collected. Just not made available.