The 2026 men’s FIFA World Cup is a critical moment for the entire soccer ecosystem in North America, including content businesses in and around the sport. FBRef, the soccer vertical of Sports Reference, launched just prior to the 2018 World Cup and is seeing the 2026 edition of the tournament continue to boost traffic. Founder Sean Forman said the site has seen a lift of almost 50% from this time last year, especially when upstarts like Cabo Verde had surprise results.
“Definitely when somebody obscure does something positive,” he told SBJ, “it is generally good for us.”
While Sports Reference does sell subscriptions to Stathead, its advanced data search tool, about 90% of its revenue is through advertising. The company contracted with programmatic ad partner Freestar 10 years ago and started implementing video in 2022. The rollout of video content with pre-roll ads generated $1M in new revenue in its first quarter and now accounts for 42% of total revenue.
Sports Reference has, to date, opted to license the video it plays on site and help fuel others to do so on social channels, rather than become a media company with its own video or podcast production.
“You’ll see a lot of content creators on social media or YouTube using Sports Reference data,” Forman said. “You’ll see our tables in their content show up, and so we really want to enable that creation.”
Comprehensive player stats
The biggest site upgrade prior to this World Cup was the research effort to ensure that every participating player had an updated page with his professional club stats, as well as the entire history of the tournament. At launch eight years ago, FBRef only had six leagues accounted for -- the biggest five European leagues, plus MLS -- and historic data only back to 1990.
Breakout performances from Ivory Coast winger Yan Diomandé prompted numerous visits to learn his background, and Lionel Messi’s first-match hat trick for Argentina led many fans in search of past World Cup hat tricks.
Forman’s suite of sites began with Baseball Reference and now includes a page for most major sports. FBRef is unique in that roughly 75% of visits are international, although the basketball and baseball counterparts have notable global reach as well.
Interestingly, FBRef used to offer translations in French, Portuguese, Spanish and German, but Forman said the majority of visitors accessed the English version -- either to read the site in English or to use their browsers’ native AI translation tool.
“We see that traffic internationalizing,” Forman said. “The audience for sports data is just becoming broader and more diverse.”
Another driver of recent growth was the acquisition of Immaculate Grid, a trivia game in the spirit of Wordle and Sudoku. It started as a daily baseball game but has expanded to other sports after Sports Reference bought it in July 2023, including a soccer version called Immaculate Footy. The site has seen 31% year-over-year growth since.
