logo: soccer ball in a cardboard box

About SportsArchive

Founded in 2021, SportsArchive is a website dedicated to archiving and preserving all things sports. Too often, teams and leagues are so focused on what's next that they don't preserve a history of what's past, or if they do, they don't make it easily accessible to the public. The goal of SportsArchive is to hold on to that history and make it easily browsable for all.

SportsArchive is run by Hayden Schiff. You can read more about Hayden on his personal website.

Contact

Development

The code that powers SportsArchive is free and open source software available under the MIT License. You can find it on GitHub. Credits and more license details can be found in the repository's readme.

The to-do list for this project is managed on Trello.

SportsArchive takes a lot of my time and has some server costs. If you'd like to support the project, you can toss a few bucks my way via PayPal.

API

SportsArchive has a very basic JSON API. Please be warned: this API is very unstable and may change at any time. Click here to view the documentation.

How this site works

Disclaimer: This site is largely focused on U.S. and Canada sports, because cultural/language barriers prevent me from doing justice to foreign sports. I may make assertions on this page that are not true in the rest of the world.

This site has its origins in a folder that once lived on my laptop simply called "soccer/", which held tons and tons of data meticulously sorted by team, then by what type of file it was. Now that I've published my hoarded data (and expanded into other sports), I've tried to organize it in a way that will perhaps make sense to people besides myself, but it hasn't strayed too far from its origins. I certainly would not claim my system is perfect, but it gets the job done.

Every single file on this site is tied to either a team or an organization. A team represents well, a team that plays sports, and an organization represents just about any other entity (leagues, governing bodies, tournaments, conferences, etc). An organization is not necessarily a literal legally-distinct organization; it might also represent a concept or a brand (for example, the U.S. Open Cup is not really its own organization – it's just a tournament put on by the U.S. Soccer Federation. I created a separate organization for the U.S. Open Cup simply to avoid cluttering the USSF's page.) Really, in the backend of this site, there is little difference between a team and an organization; the distinction is there mainly because it seemed weird to have them mixed together.

Currently, there are two types of files that can be attached to a team/organization: headshots and documents.

Headshots

Headshots are official portrait photographs of players and team staff. Most teams in most professional sports leagues take a headshot of every player each season; these are used for their website, their television broadcasts, and for other media uses.

On this site, headshots can only be attached to teams (not organizations), and they are sorted into annual seasons. At the moment, headshots are only available for soccer teams for the most part. I've uploaded for a handful of baseball and football teams, but I do not have consistent access to headshots for non-soccer teams and I have not made it a priority for the time being.

One thing that was important to me is that all headshots are uploaded at the absolutely maximum quality that is available to me. The season page shows low-res thumbnail versions of each headshot, but if you click on the thumbnail, you can see the headshot in maximum quality (often many megapixels and many megabytes – the thumbnail versions are necessary to avoid slow load times and exorbitant bandwidth costs). Note however, that I do not always have a high-quality source for the headshots; in fact, some headshots are shockingly low-quality. In all cases, the version that is on the site is the best version I have.

Documents

Documents are the main focus of this site, and they can include just about anything. There are PDFs, images, spreadsheets, Word documents, ZIP files, and more in our documents section.

I have made a significant effort to have a universal organization system for all documents for all teams/organizations. All documents must be placed in one of just a few categories, and all teams/organizations use the same set of categories. This means that occasionally, a file might be sorted in a slightly unorthodox way, or maybe someone else would have done it differently; however, this also means that once you get used to the system, you can visit any page on the site and more-or-less know what you're looking at.

Some of the categories on this site have a very precise definition, and all documents in that category will follow a semi-strict naming scheme; other categories are a bit more open-ended. Here's a list of all the document categories and what they're used for:

Filenames

When you download a document, the filename will typically match the original name that the file had when I originally found it. Sometimes these filenames can provide a little bit of additional context about a file, such as a date or version number. However, if the file originally had a name that I deemed meaningless or unhelpful (e.g. mwh9p8ielhs1y9iquiak.pdf, file.pdf, etc), then I will typically rename it to something more descriptive before adding it to the site (typically this follows the format of "[team name] [description of file in lowercase]"; e.g. "Cincinnati Reds 2022 media guide.pdf").

Sometimes the filename will not be the original filename, strictly speaking, but it will be the result of whatever process I used to obtain the file. For example, if I encounter a website with hundreds of files I want – instead of manually downloading them all, I might write some code to download them. depending on the specifics, I might make my code name each file after the label of the link to that file, or I might automatically generate filenames, or anything else that makes sense in that situation.

Other notes

One other point of interest on this site is logos. For every team/organization, I try to find a high-quality vector version of their logo, and upload it to the site as an SVG file. In many cases, I have created a vector version by tracing whatever images I could find online. I have also removed the trademark/reserved symbols from virtually all logos on the site. For soccer teams that sometimes add one or more stars above their logo to symbolize past championships, I will generally remove these stars. There are still a few raster (PNG) logos on the site, but I try to make them as rare as possible. In all cases, the logos on this site should be the best available version that exists on the internet.