understatapi 0.4.0

An API for scraping data from understat.com

understatAPI

This is a python API for scraping data from understat.com. Understat is a website with football data for 6 european leagues for every season since 2014/15 season. The leagues available are the Premier League, La Liga, Ligue 1, Serie A, Bundesliga and the Russian Premier League.

Installation

To install the package run

pip install understatapi

If you would like to use the package with the latest development changes you can clone this repo and install the package

git clone [e-mail]:collinb9/understatAPI understatAPI
cd understatAPI
python setup.py install

This package primarily uses the requests library for interacting with understat.com, but the function UnderstatClient.seach(), which allows you to use the search bar, is implemented using selenium. If you wish to use this function then you will have to install geckodriver.

Quick Start

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NOTE

This package is in very early stages of development and the API is likely to change

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The API contains endpoints which reflect the structure of the understat website. Below is a table showing the different endpoints and the pages on understat.com to which they correspond

Endpoint	Webpage
UnderstatClient.league	https://understat.com/league/<league_name>
UnderstatClient.team	https://understat.com/team/<team_name>/
UnderstatClient.player	https://understat.com/player/<player_id>
UnderstatClient.match	https://understat.com/player/<match_id>

Every function in the public API corresponds to one of tables visible on the understat webpage corresponding to the endpoint to which it belongs. Each function returns a pandas DataFrame with the relevant data. Below are some examples of using the API. Note how some the functions in the league and team endpoints can accept understandable strings as identifiers, but player and match must receive an id number.

from understatapi import UnderstatClient

understat = UnderstatClient()
# get data for every player playing in the Premier League in 2019/20
league_player_data = understat.league(league="EPL").get_player_data(season="2019")
# Get the name and id of the player with the highest xG this season
# First we need to change the type of the 'xG' column, by default it is a string
league_player_data["xG"] = league_player_data["xG"].astype(float)
league_player_data = league_player_data.sort_values(by="xG", ascending=False)
player_id, player_name = league_player_data.iloc[0][["id", "player_name"]].values
# Get data for every shot this player has taken in a league match (for all seasons)
player_shot_data = understat.player(player=player_id).get_shot_data()

from understatapi import UnderstatClient

understat = UnderstatClient()
# get data for every league match involving Manchester United
team_match_data = understat.team(team="Manchester_United").get_match_data(season="2019")
# get the id for the first match of the season
match_id = match_data.iloc[0]["id"]
# get the rosters for the both teams in that match
roster_data = understat.match(match=match_id).get_roster_data()

You can also use the UnderstatClient class as a context manager which persists some information about the session between request and closes the session after it has been used. This is the recommended way to interact with the API.

from understatapi import UnderstatClient

with UnderstatClient() as understat:
    team_match_data = understat.team(team="Manchester_United").get_match_data()

There are some more examples here TODO: Add more examples and link to them For a full API reference, see the documentation TODO: Add link to docs

Contributing

If you find any bugs in the code or have any feature requests, please make an issue and I'll try to address it as soon as possible. If you would like to implement the changes yourself you can make a pull request

• Clone this repo git clone [e-mail]:collinb9/understatAPI
• Create a branch to work off git checkout -b descriptive_branch_name
• Make and commit your changes
• Push your changes git push
• Come back to this page, and click on Pull requests -> New pull request

Before a pull request can be merged the code will have to pass a number of checks that are run using TravisCI. These checks are

• Check that the code has been formatted using black
• Lint the code using pylint
• Check type annotations using mypy
• Run the unit tests and check that they have 100% coverage

These checks are in place to ensure a consistent style and quality across the code. To check if the changes you have made will pass these tests run

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r test_requirments.txt
chmod +x ci/run_tests.sh
ci/run_tests.sh

Don't let these tests deter you from making a pull request. Make the changes to introduce the new functionality/bug fix and then I will be happy to help get the code to a stage where it passes the tests.

Versioning

The versioning for this project follows the semantic versioning conventions.

TODO

• Add functionality for using the search bar on understat
• Make APIClient a context manager that allows you to persist a session
• Creat an async API along with the current synchronous one