www.enfa.co.uk

[silvermane]

The English National Football Archive is supposed to launch on August 1. It will contain the details of all matches of the Football League, FA Cup, League Cup and minor cups.

Annual subscription is set at GBP 32.00 (24 hours subscription is GBP 5.00) so far, which is reasonable enough, BUT...

There is a serious drawback in that users are supposed to view no more than 1000 pages per month. Apparently it does not matter whether these pages are accessed quickly (i.e. spidered) or by normal browsing. This is not an automatically enforced limit, and exceeding it only results in a warning. However, it is certain that any persistent breach and suspicious behavior (such as using multiple accounts to overcome the limit) will result in a permanent ban and possibly legal sanctions.

For comparison, 1000 matches is about two league seasons, seven FA Cup seasons (less for years multiple replays), or 21-23 seasons of a single club (depending on the number of teams in the league).

The cost of the entire operation would be such that, even for a single club, you're better off buying a Complete Record series book (around 20.00 GBP).

[da_boss]

I recently received an email from the sites authors - as a former user of the allfootballers-account.
Do you know whether they provide datas like goalscoring minutes or bookings?

[Lothar]

They provide goalscoring minutes (if known), substitutions (who came on for whom, but no minutes), no bookings (as far as I can see) ....

All in all it's like an online representation of the match by match series (it seems that Tony Brown of the Association of Football Statistics is responsible or one of the responsibles for both, the series and the database).
Additionally they have information of the players (Surname, Forenames, Birthdate, Birth Place, Position and several career details). Some of them only if known, of course.

On registration one can see the data of the 2011/12 season. Registration only is for free but doesn't show all information, e.g. some season totals and details of older games.

[silvermane]

Goal and sub minutes are simply not available before the 1990s - not even in Rothmans. The only way to find these data is to painstakingly browse through newspaper reports (NOT in The Times, rather the smaller regional papers which cover a single FL team or two). It goes without saying that these are not available on the net.

Regardless, the 1000 page limit for month makes ENFA all but worthless for our purposes. MAYBE for the FA/League Cup if you want to focus on that (although lineups of non-league team are missing).

@da_boss: this might interest you: http://www.historical-lineups.com/

[silvermane]

Apparently, the monthly page limit was increased to 3000 recently. It seems that few people have subscribed and the server load is not so large. Now this is more like it should be, although spidering is still out of question.

Also, you can get access for one week instead of 24 hours for GBP 5 (not that it is useful w/o spidering).

[da_boss]

@da_boss: this might interest you: http://www.historical-lineups.com/

In fact I do know this site since one week or so AND this is the guy who did the same lineups in a forum someone told me about.
So I take my 70s lineups from this site...and the years between the end of Tony Browns book series (69/70) and the first RFY copy that Kallegeils gave me years ago are filled with data.

The dream of having a full data coverage for lineups and goals in a DFS-DB is coming closer and closer.