Transfermarkt Transfers (tmtransfers)

All soccer/football club transfers from 1992/93–2020/21 for 10 of the top European leagues, namely

1. Premier League 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
2. La Liga 🇪🇸
3. Bundesliga 🇩🇪
4. Serie A 🇮🇹
5. Ligue 1 🇫🇷
6. Primeira Liga 🇵🇹
7. Eredivisie 🇳🇱
8. Premier Liga* 🇷🇺
9. Jupiler Pro League* 🇧🇪
10. Scottish Premiership* 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Data were obtained by web scraping league transfer data from Transfermarkt.

* Transfermarkt does not provide data for the 2011/12 Premier Liga season, the 1992/93 and 1993/94 Jupiler Pro League seasons, or the 1992/93–2002/03 Scottish Premiership seasons.

Data

All data are provided in the data directory and grouped into season subdirectories. Feel free to use this dataset for your own purposes! You can clone it or download it via DownGit. Consult the README for more information.

Usage

If you'd like to pull the raw data directly from the source or scrape data for other countries and leagues, you can use the Python script provided by tmtransfers.

Setup and running the script

Clone this repository and open a terminal in the cloned folder. First ensure all dependencies are met:

pip install -r requirements.txt

The module can now be run as a script from the top directory:

python -m tmtransfers

This launches a series of text prompts. You should see the following output to start:

Select currency (default is euro):
[1] EUR €
[2] GBP £
[3] USD $
===>

Follow the prompts to input your desired league parameters. Scraped data will then be written to CSVs in a created data directory.

As an example, an output CSV for the Premier League's 2020/21 season with the default options and before cleaning should look like:

club	name	age	nationality	position	short_pos	market_value	dealing_club	dealing_country	fee	movement	window	league	season
Arsenal FC	Thomas Partey	27	Ghana	Defensive Midfield	DM	€40.00m	Atlético Madrid	Spain	€50.00m	in	summer	premier-league	2020
Arsenal FC	Gabriel	22	Brazil	Centre-Back	CB	€20.00m	LOSC Lille	France	€26.00m	in	summer	premier-league	2020
Arsenal FC	Pablo Marí	26	Spain	Centre-Back	CB	€4.80m	Flamengo	Brazil	€5.00m	in	summer	premier-league	2020
Arsenal FC	Rúnar Alex Rúnarsson	25	Iceland	Goalkeeper	GK	€1.20m	Dijon	France	€2.00m	in	summer	premier-league	2020
Arsenal FC	Cédric Soares	28	Portugal	Right-Back	RB	€8.00m	Southampton	England	free transfer	in	summer	premier-league	2020

Note: If you run the script again and scrape data for the same league and same season, the existing CSV will be overwritten. Be sure to move or rename existing files if you need them as is before running the script again.

Using the module

If you'd like to use this module elsewhere, install it from the top directory with

pip install .

It provides two functions, scrape_transfermarkt and tidy_transfers. Use them like so:

import pandas
import tmtransfers

# Web scrape data for a league not explicitly given in the script
# Returns a Pandas dataframe
df = tmtransfers.scrape_transfermarkt(
        league_name='championship',
        league_id='GB2',
        season_id='2005',
        write=True)

# Clean the data
# Returns another Pandas dataframe
tidy_df = tmtransfers.tidy_transfers(df)

See the documentation in tmtransfers.py for more details.

Note: These functions have been tested for only the above leagues through the listed seasons. You'll have to browse Transfermarkt for what to input to scrape other countries and leagues.

Source

All data are scraped from Transfermarkt according to their terms of use.