Analytics is where football data goes to be turned into something else: a model, a dashboard, a scouting shortlist, a published study, a product. That makes analysts the buyers with the strictest requirements, and the ones most often burned: data too shallow to model, files too small to matter, or a licence that forbids publishing the very work the data was bought for.
This page is written for that buyer. Dribble's analytics offer in one paragraph: Opta-sourced event data under licence, 57M+ event rows with XY coordinates and pre-shot xG, queryable in BigQuery from your own Google Cloud project or downloadable as CSV, with commercial and published-research rights on the Pro and Max tiers.
What Analytics Work Actually Needs
Event-level depth, not aggregates. Aggregates tell you what happened; events let you ask why. Our BigQuery event tables carry every on-ball action with Opta XY coordinates and standard qualifiers, alongside entity, match, appearance, and transfer tables: 1.5M+ appearances, 86K+ team-match rows, 90,582 players, 8,054 teams, 41,017 matches, 179,554 transfers.
xG you can defend. Our expected goals is Opta's pre-shot xG (qualifier 321), one consistent definition across 32 competitions and every season from 2020 to the present, which is what makes pooled models and cross-league comparisons valid. Post-shot xG is not yet live in our pipeline; it is specified, not shipped, and we will not sell it to you early.
A warehouse, not a download folder. BigQuery means your queries run against the full history at once: joins across seasons, competitions, and entity tables, from your own GCP project (you pay Google $5/TB after the 1TB monthly free tier, we handle the data pipeline). Refresh cadence by tier: monthly on Starter, weekly on Pro (landing 24 to 48 hours after the whistle), daily snapshots on Max (after 06:00 UTC ingestion, with revision history).
Files when files are better. For offline work and notebooks, the Legacy Archive puts 6 completed seasons on your disk for $49 one-time: 1.25M+ player-match rows at 306 columns, 70,927 team-match rows at 303 columns, plus matches, players, teams, managers, referees, transfers, and reference tables. The files stay yours forever, and the subscriber workspace includes sample CSVs, the full schema, and SQL, Python, and Node examples before you commit.
The Licence, Because Analysts Publish
| Use | Starter $49/mo | Pro $149/mo | Max $499/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal and academic research | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Commercial apps, dashboards, models | No | Yes | Yes |
| Published research (commercial) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Refresh | Monthly | Weekly | Daily snapshots |
| Player data | Core fields | Full biographical data | Full biographical data |
Raw-data redistribution is not included on any tier by default: serving the raw rows to third parties requires a separately signed Max order form and data-licence addendum (Terms, sections 6 and 8). Your derived work (statistics, aggregates, visualisations, models, papers) is yours to publish and monetise on Pro and Max.
Frequently Asked
What football data is best for analytics and modeling? Event-level data with coordinates and a consistent xG definition, in a queryable warehouse. On Dribble that is BigQuery: 57M+ Opta event rows with XY and pre-shot xG, 32 competitions, 2020 to present, from $49/mo.
Can I publish research built on Dribble data? Yes on BigQuery Pro ($149/mo) and Max ($499/mo), whose commercial licence expressly covers published research, and on API Elite and Flite for API-based work. Starter is for personal and academic use.
Can I sell a dashboard or model built on it? Yes, on the commercial tiers. Derived products are the intended use. Only redistributing the raw data itself needs a signed addendum.
How do I query it, and what does querying cost? You submit a Google account email or service account at dribble360.com/subscribers, receive a Data Viewer grant, and query from your own GCP billing project. Google includes 1TB of queries a month free, then charges $5/TB.
Is there sample data I can evaluate first? Yes: sample CSVs (player matches and match events) with the full schema in the subscriber workspace, and free sample data on Kaggle (Dribble360 Football Data Samples, 18 competitions).
Is the data live? No. It is post-match data: weekly refresh on Pro, daily snapshots on Max. There is no live feed.
Analyse it, publish it, sell it. BigQuery Pro is $149/mo with the commercial and published-research licence most analysts actually need. See Plans and Pricing