How to build a query

1. Choose what you’re looking for

Click Football entity… after FIND. There are seven things to find: Team, Match, Tournament (one edition, e.g. FIFA World Cup 2014), Goal, Player, Card and Appearance (one player in one match: minutes, goals, cards, position, debut). Streaks come later — they belong to a team, or to a player.

Short cut: type a name straight into the finder. Brazil offers “Team named Brazil”; mbappe offers Kylian Mbappé. Accents and capitals don’t matter anywhere.

2. Narrow it with conditions

Click + on a block to open the finder for it. It offers only what fits: that entity’s properties, the relations it can follow, shortcuts, and clauses. Pick a property and set its operator and value — e.g. Confederation is UEFA.

• Operators depend on the type: text has contains / starts with / is; numbers have > ≥ < ≤ = ≠ between; dates have after, before, on, between, in year, in decade, in the last N years, more than N years ago, this year, this decade; names and lists (a team, a confederation, a stage) have is / is not / is any of; yes/no properties have is — and some, like Comeback, can be unknown where the record is incomplete.
• AND or OR. Conditions in a block all have to hold. Click the AND between them to make any one enough.
• Mixing AND and OR needs a condition group (finder → Operators), so the precedence is always visible.
• A condition with no value yet is simply ignored — nothing breaks while you’re typing.

3. Follow relations to other things

Relations appear in the finder as played → Match, was won by → Team and so on. Each adds a nested block; its conditions apply to the thing it reaches. A parent is kept if at least one of its related things passes — “teams that played a match where…”.

The team in focus. A match reached from a team (played) is seen from that team’s side, so it gains Result, Opponent, Goals for, Ground and the rest. The block shows a “team in focus” tag. A match on its own has no side: add from the side of → Team to give it one. Tournaments reached from a team (played in, won) gain that team’s Finish, record and group place.

Two sibling blocks both have to hold — so a match with played by England and played by Germany is a head-to-head.

4. What a row is

The deepest shown block decides what each row is. Blocks above it add a column naming themselves; hidden blocks (eye menu → Hide) only filter. So “Brazil → played → Match” with Brazil hidden lists matches; show Brazil too and each row gains Brazil’s name.

• Columns — the Columns button picks and orders them. Presentation only; the answer doesn’t change.
• Sorting — click a column heading. Also presentation only.
• Save — keeps the query in your Library, which needs you signed in with Google — everything else works without an account. Any block’s menu can also Save conditions as a shortcut or Save this block as a shortcut: your own pill, offered in the finder under Your shortcuts.
• Details — every row opens a side panel for its match, team, tournament, player, goal or streak (a card or an appearance opens its match, from that player’s side; a player’s run opens the player). Names in cells open theirs too, and panels link onwards. Team and player panels filter by years, home/away/neutral and kind of match; Full page opens everything — a tournament’s bracket, a team’s Elo by year and every match — with the filter kept.
• Graph — charts that fit the answer: results over time, goals by minute, streak timelines, scatter plots and more, drawn from every row.
• Share link — the address bar always holds the whole query; copy it or use the button.

5. Streaks

On a team, Streak of… finds runs of consecutive matches where something holds. It has two slots:

• Of what — Wins, Unbeaten, Draws, Clean sheets, Scored in… or Custom, any match conditions (e.g. Scorers for includes Kylian Mbappé).
• Across — which matches make up the sequence: all, competitive, finals, one competition, or custom. Matches outside it neither extend nor break a run. Choose editions of a competition for runs of tournaments instead: consecutive World Cups, titles in a row.

A streak has Length, Start and End dates, Is active (still going) and Ended by. Is most recent and keep the longest pick one run per team. Show matches on a streak row lists the run itself.

On a player, Run of… does the same for them: consecutive Appearances, Starts or Full matches in their side’s matches, or Scoring appearances in a row. Matches whose line-ups (or, for scoring, scorers) aren’t known are skipped rather than breaking the run.

6. Line-ups, cards and appearances

Where a match’s line-ups are known, everyone who started or came on is on record, with their minutes, position, goals and cards. Three things to find use them:

• Player — caps, starts, substitute appearances, Minutes played, Minutes per goal, Position, Won / Drawn / Lost and Win % when playing, Clean sheets, cards. From a player: played in, started or came on in → Match (their side in focus), received → Card, made appearance → Appearance.
• Appearance — one player in one match: Started, Came on, Taken off, Minutes, Played the whole match, Goals, Booked, Sent off, Position, Shirt number, Result, Recorded cap number and Debut. Group appearances by player and sum their minutes, or count distinct tournaments.
• Card — a yellow, a second yellow or a red: its Minute, the player and team, and Shown to a substitute.

Goals gain Scored by a substitute, Minutes after coming on, On debut and Scorer’s position; a match gains Cards shown and Sendings-off, and, with a team in focus, Sent off (theirs), Opponents sent off, Starting XI’s caps and Changes to the XI. The Full record only shortcut keeps matches whose scorers, line-ups and cards are all known.

Players link to each other too: played alongside and played against reach team-mates and opponents, who gain Matches shared, Starts shared and Pair — group by Pair for the most-used partnerships.

7. Group, measure, keep

Clauses at the end of the query change the answer’s shape:

• per… makes each row a group — per opponent, per year, per scorer. It starts with a count.
• + measure adds columns: counts (Wins, Draws…, or count where…), distinct counts (different tournaments), totals, averages, highest and lowest, first and last (by date), and calculated measures — a difference, a ratio or “as % of”.
• keep where… keeps rows or groups whose column passes: Goals ≥ 10, or against another column — Lost > ‹Won›.
• keep top… ranks and keeps the first N — overall, or for each value of a column (top scorer for each tournament), with ties kept if you like.

Group rows have View matches (or goals, or whatever was grouped), listing the rows behind the group.

A match reached from a team is seen from that team, so when both sides fit — every UEFA side’s matches — a UEFA v UEFA match comes twice. The results then offer List each match once, which keeps one row per match (the winner’s view). Starting from Match with a hidden played by → Team block gives the same list with no team in focus.

8. The block menu

The eye button on each block opens its menu.

• Required · Optional · Negated. Optional keeps parents with no match (columns blank, counts 0). Negated keeps only parents with no match — “teams that never…”. Negate the block that must not exist: for “never played England”, negate the match, not the England block.
• AND / OR between blocks. Click the AND before a second child block to make either enough — “won the World Cup or the Copa América”.
• Reorder as query root pivots the tree so that block leads; the answer stays the same.
• Rename gives a block a name used in columns and the sentence.
• Set an alias lets other blocks refer to this one: is the same as ‹Champion›, or compare a value with it — Host countries includes ‹W›, Date after ‹T›’s end date.
• Ungroup breaks a shortcut pill into its parts.

9. Facts worked out from the results

• Elo ratings for every side before every match, and upsets.
• The run of play where every goal has a scorer: each goal’s role (opener, equaliser, winning goal…), comebacks, lead changes.
• Finish at each finals tournament (Winner … Group stage) and group position.
• Next and previous — a team’s next match; a competition’s next edition (the team in focus carries over).
• Gaps — years since a player’s previous goal, a team’s last win, years between World Cup appearances.
• From the line-ups — minutes, debuts, clean sheets, a player’s record with and without them (on their full page), and who played together most.

Recipes

Each opens in the builder, so you can see how it’s made and change it.

Relations at a glance

Know the data

• Results are from openfootball’s international archive, with martj42’s after openfootball’s last day (the 2026 World Cup among them). Scores are after extra time; a shootout counts as a draw under Result and for whoever went through under Result incl. penalties.
• Historical sides are merged into their FIFA successors (Soviet Union → Russia, Yugoslavia → Serbia, West Germany → Germany). Matches against non-FIFA sides are left out.
• Scorers are named for about half of all goals — every World Cup goal, most since 2016, few in friendlies before then — so goal and player totals are lower bounds.
• Line-ups and cards come from the Fjelstul World Cup Database (World Cups since 1970) and ESPN (most competitive matches since about 2003, friendlies since about 2016). Caps and card counts are lower bounds; Line-ups known, Cards known and Scorers / Line-ups / Cards from on a match say what's there.
• A player is a name plus a side; the same name more than 20 years apart is taken to be two people. The sources’ player ids join two spellings of one person, and split a name only when two ids played in the same match.
• Minutes run from kick-off or coming on to the final whistle, being taken off or being sent off; stoppage time counts as the 45th or 90th minute. Positions come from the sources, which rarely give one for a substitute. A Debut is only known where the side’s line-ups go back two years unbroken — otherwise a first recorded cap may not be the first.
• Finishes need named stages; many regional cups don’t have them. Tournaments without a final (1950 World Cup, early Copas) have no winner.