Coverage
Every total on this site is a sum of what the database holds, not of what happened. The record runs from 1866 and it thins as it goes back; a career total, a season total and a league total are all floors. This page says what is actually on file, so that pages showing a sum can point here instead of repeating the caveat.
Games
72,925 games are on record. 72,910 of them carry a date, and 20,187 an attendance figure. A competition's season is loaded whole or not at all, so a missing season is missing entirely rather than half-present — but many seasons are missing, and the per-competition pages say which.
The shape of the record
How much is on file, decade by decade, and how much is known about it. The early decades are thin and the recent ones are dense; that is a fact about what survives and what has been transcribed, not about how much soccer was played.
| decade | games | lineup | scorers | crowd |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1890s | 20 | 75% | 65% | 50% |
| 1900s | 0 | — | — | — |
| 1910s | 2 | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| 1920s | 1,884 | 61% | 66% | 27% |
| 1930s | 422 | 60% | 61% | 32% |
| 1940s | 13 | 100% | 92% | 100% |
| 1950s | 15 | 100% | 100% | 93% |
| 1960s | 786 | 23% | 91% | 93% |
| 1970s | 2,080 | 100% | 95% | 99% |
| 1980s | 1,403 | 100% | 97% | 99% |
| 1990s | 4,048 | 23% | 22% | 23% |
| 2000s | 6,559 | 40% | 37% | 38% |
| 2010s | 27,004 | 14% | 24% | 16% |
| 2020s | 28,674 | 15% | 36% | 26% |
A share is of that decade's own dated games, so a thin decade and a fat one can be compared on how well each is known rather than on how big it is. lineup counts a game with at least one appearance on record, not a complete eleven.
Goals
83,557 goals name a scorer. 62,673 of those also carry a minute. A game whose final score is known but whose scorers are not contributes to standings and to nobody's goal total, which is why a league's goals-per-game figure and the sum of its players' goals do not agree.
Appearances and minutes
456,529 appearances are on record, of which 379,875 carry minutes played. The split is by era rather than at random: the ASL, the original NASL and the indoor leagues recorded lineups without minutes, so a career crossing those years has games played and no minutes at all. Where a page can only measure playing time in games, it says so.
Season stat lines are thinner still — 64,512 on record, 46,664 of them with minutes.
Cards, fouls, substitutions
None. The database has a place for cards, fouls and substitutions, and nothing has been transcribed into it — no parsed source carries them. Goals are the only in-game event loaded. See the events index.
People
39,425 people are on record and 12,183 of them have a birthdate. Birthplaces are thinner still, and unevenly so: whole competitions carry none. Any count of players by birthplace is a count of the ones whose birthplace is known, and the pages that break playing time down by country carry a row for the time that can't be attributed rather than quietly dropping it.
Caps
National-team caps and international goals are summed from lineups, so every game missing a lineup undercounts them. The USMNT record here is short of the US Soccer Federation's official count, and not by a constant — some years match, some are missing games, and a few hold games the federation does not count. Cobi Jones won 164 caps by the federation's reckoning; the figure on his page is what the lineups on file add up to. Treat any cap total here as what this database can prove, not as the official number.
Errors
Some of the record is simply wrong. Every page carries a link to report an error, and the sources behind each game are listed on it, so a figure can be checked rather than taken on trust. If you have a season the database is missing, get in touch.