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Ideas

League Tables

  • Stu

There are hundreds of football related websites, many of which have copies of results and/or league tables.

Wouldn't it be great if the workload could be taken off the many volunteers who often run these sites, by having specific league table, fixtures and results xml feed.

It would then be possible to write modules in perl, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, JSP etc to allow webmasters to incorporate the data in a customisable format, without worrying about having to update everything after a matchday.

  • 12 May 2005 05:47 PM

Comments  Post a comment

Because you have to pay a licence to show fixtures on your site - its about £24k I think! A year!

  • 2.
  • On 12 May 2005 08:03 PM,
  • David said:

I agree. If this was the same for loads of various things that many websites duplicate, just think of how much time would be saved.

  • 3.
  • On 12 May 2005 09:49 PM,
  • Paul said:

I believe there are some copyright issues about the display of fixtures/results... although if this could be done, it would be awesome!

  • 4.
  • On 12 May 2005 10:51 PM,
  • Steve said:

Unfortunately the league tables are copyright even if you create them yourself by hand :-(

You will notice that many websites stopped displaying them a couple of years ago, as they were asked to pay for a license or stop doing it under legal threat.

  • 5.
  • On 12 May 2005 10:51 PM,
  • Jim said:

I like this idea. Please keep me informed if you are able to get some type of framework in place to make this happen. I would be willing to give some time to make this happen.

  • 6.
  • On 12 May 2005 10:52 PM,
  • Esteban said:

I've been always looking for something like this. It would be totally awesome. Please BBC, go for it!

I guess BBC would allow this only for non-commercial applications (which is exactly my goal, by the way). But even for commercial applications they might find here an interesting source of revenue.

Terrific idea

  • 7.
  • On 12 May 2005 11:44 PM,
  • Gids said:

The problem here is not so much technical as leaguel. The BBC licenses this data from Football Dataco Limited so I guess it'd have to buy a license for every site that syndicated the feed!

  • 8.
  • On 12 May 2005 11:45 PM,
  • Oli Cole said:

If the BBC published some data.. it would be possible to run it through some XSLT to produce SportsML, a 'standard' XML format for sports results.


Or the BBC could just produce the SportsML in the first place :)

http://www.sportsml.org/

Sounds useful, though unfortunately (and quite unbelievably) you have to be fairly careful as to what football data you make use of on a website, thanks to the fine league folk who setup a company to manage and police the use of fixtures, results, team data and so on.

There's a good guide to the data licencing issues on http://www.resyk.com/weblog/archives/000031.html

  • 10.
  • On 13 May 2005 04:13 AM,
  • Christian said:

Good Call Stu,

Thats a super idea.

  • 11.
  • On 13 May 2005 08:51 AM,
  • David said:

This is a good idea - and one I've been implementing for the last few years! - see FixturesLive. It's a free service - sorry for the plug.

We cover more leagues in amateur sport than anyone, and keep growing. We do some limited 'syndication'...and we're open to ideas re XML or RSS.

  • 12.
  • On 13 May 2005 08:54 AM,
  • nick rich said:

Nice idea .. but premier division fixtures and results are a legal nightmare as you can't just publish them with out authorisation and paying for them. Unless the BBC could find someway round it.

We recieved the following when we tried to do this:-

We write on behalf of the Football Data Co Limited which is the appointed
licensee of the FA Premier League, the Football League, the Scottish
Premier League and the Scottish Football League ("the Leagues") in respect
of the licensing of certain intellectual property rights of the Leagues,
including those in the fixture lists for this season August 2004 - May
2005 ("the Fixture Lists"), for use by third parties.

We have noticed that your website
is displaying Football
Fixtures. In order to display the Fixture Lists you must obtain the
necessary licence from the Press Association.

We wish to make you aware that we have a good faith belief that your
present use is an infringement of the Leagues' legal rights and that all
such unauthorised use must cease immediately. Please confirm by return
your agreement to this and give your undertaking to cease all such
infringements on any and all of your web sites. Pending your response the
Leagues' rights are fully reserved.

The Leagues have appointed the Press Association as their official agent
for the licensing and distribution of the Fixtures List. If you have
inadvertently infringed our clients' copyright please take immediate steps
to contact the Press Association (Email customer.services@pa.press.net) to
obtain the appropriate licence. Please confirm to us by e-mail that you
are now seeking an appropriate licence. Because of the time sensitive
nature of the Fixture Lists you are required to remove them immediately
from your site pending the granting of a licence.

  • 13.
  • On 13 May 2005 09:24 AM,
  • Robbie said:

This is a good idea, and would certainly take a whole lot of work off the shoulders of a lot of webmasters.

  • 14.
  • On 13 May 2005 09:34 AM,
  • Tom said:

I agree, I also think that this would allow the development of 'live score' applications such as the one available from Sky (score.planetfootball.com).

I would consider developing a 'live score' application if a vidiprinter feed became available. Meanwhile, it is of course possible to read the vidiprinter, but this is just needless effort.

I run a fan site for Derby County FC and most of the site this season has just been links to BBC articles. If there was a web service available for club-related stats, articles and league tables, I know I will redevelop my site to accomodate for this. I would definitely be interested in latest scores live on my site if they were made available.

  • 16.
  • On 13 May 2005 10:29 AM,
  • Struan said:

I think you might find that there are various legal issues with data ownership on these things.

  • 17.
  • On 13 May 2005 11:26 AM,
  • Steve said:

Get's my vote!

  • 18.
  • On 13 May 2005 11:27 AM,
  • Oliver said:

I believe that this would be a great idea, however I believe there may be certain copyrights involved in producing league tables.

Aren't league tables copyrighted to the FA?

  • 20.
  • On 13 May 2005 12:16 PM,
  • roger said:

Seems that the RFU will be doing this from their website what we want is similar

  • 21.
  • On 13 May 2005 12:44 PM,
  • EnricoSalad said:

what about only displaying part-tables, specifically the position/results of an individual team?

  • 22.
  • On 13 May 2005 04:01 PM,
  • matt cook said:

This idea is only really viable for leagues small enough to see the free distribution of this sort of data as advertising rather than lost revenue.

  • 23.
  • On 15 May 2005 07:53 PM,
  • Sam Smith said:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/feeds.opml
includes a link to an individual feed for most teams

  • 24.
  • On 09 Jun 2005 04:45 PM,
  • Patrick said:

I like the idea of having the league tables on RSS, OPML or something like it.

If somebody knows how to do this easily for the korfball results... please share it with me. I will try and convince the webmaster to make it easier for many of the UK korfball clubs as well as for myself of course.

  • 25.
  • On 15 Jun 2005 11:25 PM,
  • Jason said:

People:

League tables and results are public domain and the law on informing people about up and coming events(including football fixtures) states

Copyright, Designs And Patents Act 1988
Section 30 Criticism, review and news reporting
Subsection (2) Fair dealing with a work (other than a photograph) for the purpose of reporting current events does not infringe any copyright in the work provided that (...) it is accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement.

  • 26.
  • On 21 Jul 2005 06:16 AM,
  • Chris said:

The legal issue is a touchy one at the moment an in the middle of court action.

I received the same letter as described above just this morning and have now been busy researching - I originally thought this was a practical joke being played on me... that's how rediculous this is ....

Here are three stories on it, however, in summary:
- league tables are public domain (ie not copywrite protected)
- fixture lists are 'thought' to be copywrite protected in the UK under a database protection law. - this is not the case in America and no longer in European (recently went to court)
- UK does not normally differ then the European courts on this matter and will hopefully rule with sanity rather then greed

- http://www.olswang.com/news.asp?page=newssing&sid=111&aid=956]Olswang.com Story
- http://www.twobirds.com/english/publications/articles/British_Horseracing_Board_v_William_Hill.cfm]Twobirds.com Story
- http://www.footballeconomy.com/]Football Economy

Let's all hope for some sanity in this matter. After all, we are supporters / fans not parasites taking away their money. We are the guys who spend our hard earned dollar (sorry pound) to attend their matches; buy their jersies; pay for the TV subscriptions; travel to remote locations like Istanbul to watch them; stand for hours in the rain; snow and hail waiting for their autograph; buy their sponsor's products......

surely with all this we deserve something in return... for without us their would be no match fixture ...

perhaps we should charge them for showing up at games. after all it our voices who sing in the terraces that creates the atmosphere which results in the 12 man

perhaps another petition is in order, but then again I am sure the collection of data related to action against Football Dataco is protected somewhere !

chris

  • 27.
  • On 11 Nov 2005 02:01 PM,
  • Arjen said:

Soccerway.com has invented a system that syndicates soccer data (results/fixtures/tables from 350 competitions worldwide) to other websites through XML.

  • 28.
  • On 31 Jan 2006 05:00 PM,
  • Spum said:

I wouldn't mind actually making something of this nature; but at this present moment, i am interested in making an independant data gathering system.

I currently have set up the wikiNews Football portal, which ANYONe can contribute articles, fixtures, transfers, or generally anything they want to. It's a non-profit company, and thus escapes the clause of using the results for commercial purposes.

Anyway; my system involvesd getting just ONE supporter from each club to supply us their home game results. If we were to have that, then the field of football data would be undeniably free.

I am sure the BBC would agree that such a scheme would ensure that results were gathered from public knowledge and not regulated by the leagues.

Like i mentioned before; the wikinews footy portal is happy for people to submit match reports also under this same premise. If things continue to go as well as they have, hopefully ; within a year, the football portal will have it's data gathered from independant sources.

Here's to that!
Cheers :-)

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Portal:football

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