Anyone would like to have a money-printing machine - even we here at Apify wouldn’t mind owning one. This dream is what gets some people excited about speculating on sports betting and arbitrage algorithms. Sorry to disappoint you, but we can’t offer you some kind of a betting calculator able to collect and analyze data from different bookmakers and point at the winning team or player. After all, intuitive betting requires quite a lot of expertise in the field, deep analysis of the sports events and a dash of pure luck. Besides, we wouldn’t do it anyway, as we do not endorse gambling of any kind 🤨
However, what we can offer is an API for one of the best websites for following football events, accomplishments, team changes and the fastest capturing of livescores. And sometimes this is all you need: to get the necessary sports data quickly and from various sources, compare the odds with the expertise, and then try your luck. The first thing is something we can help with. So let’s see how a Transfermarkt API should work and how you can use it.
Why scrape Transfermarkt?
Fighting out arbitrage chances can be considered an art of its own. You can get plenty of useful insights from there, as Transfermarkt includes data on most major and minor leagues, individual players, teams content, as well as award winners of the past. You can also collect data on coach stats, special events, lineups, standings, pre-match odds, all kinds of statistics really, and of course, livescores. Transfermarkt’s stats are very adaptable and customizable, hence providing a comprehensive overview on historical data from all previous seasons to assist viewers in analyzing and forecasting upcoming match results. And the Transfers&Rumours and Forum pages deserve a highlight of their own as they have been considered quite reliable and accurate sources in the sports forecasting world.
Besides, when you explore Transfermarkt, you can also regard it as an educational resource, sort of a valuable encyclopedia of soccer statistics. You can see whether the opposing teams already have a history of facing each other, how they did before and use these insights for your arbitrage analysis. You can also scrape transfer news, fixtures, and player values on the market.
All these records of odds of football matches can be captured from a single URL page and quickly downloaded onto your computer to be used for further analysis to support and increase your forecast accuracy. Our Transfermarkt Scraper will ensure you get your records of odds of matches as soon as they appear on the website. You can also scrape data from any country-dependent subdomain of this website, be it German transfermarkt.de or American transfermarkt.us.
To summarize, this is how you can use the data extracted from Transfermarkt:
- Consolidate web scraping efforts by monitoring this and other soccer-related websites simultaneously and combining extracted data.
- Accumulating the knowledge of past games needed for analysis and sports results forecasts.
- Creating data-based rules for a betting strategy.
- Live monitoring and analysis of what motivates the evolution and changes in betting rates as well as what information influences betting decisions.
You can set up Transfermarkt Scraper to run automatically and regularly during matches. It will collect the records in your preferred format (e.g. as an Excel table). If a scraper does all the hard data collection work for you, it can make sports betting a bit more predictable and increase the chances of finding new arbitrage opportunities.
Step-by-step guide to scraping Transfermarkt
1. Start by going to the Actor's page on Apify Store. Then click the Try for free button. You will be redirected to Apify Console, which is your workspace to run tasks for your scrapers. If you already have an Apify account and are logged in, go to Step 3.
2. If you are not signed in, you’ll find yourself on the sign-up page (if you are already signed in, skip to Step 3). Sign up using your email account, Google, or GitHub. You will be redirected to the scraper’s page on your Apify Console.
3. Leave Apify Console for a moment and go over to transfermarkt.com and pick the web page you want to scrape. Let’s say we want to scrape the data on a specific player, Robert Lewandowski. Find him on the Competitions page. The most important thing here now is simply to copy the URL that your search produced.
4. Now head back to the Apify task and click “+ Add URL”. Then simply paste your Transfermarkt URL into the appearing field. You can also tweak the crawlDepth and pageDepth parameters here. Mind that higher numbers will take longer to scrape and more CU off your plan. So if you want to stick with the most recent results, don’t set those parameters too high.
5. Once you are all set, click the Start button. Notice that your task will change its status to Running, so wait for the scraper's run to finish. It will be just a minute before you see the status switch to Succeeded.
6. Move to the Dataset tab to see the results of your scraping. Explore the Dataset tab containing your scraped data in many formats, including HTML table, JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and RSS feed.
7. Preview the data by clicking the Preview button or viewing it in a new tab if the dataset is too large. You can choose to download it onto your computer for further use as spreadsheets or in other apps and your projects.
One last little reminder: the job of our Transfermarkt scraper is to extract only the relevant information in a well-structured manner. So can it help you out with placing bets? Rather no than yes, but it will get all the info you need to make the right betting decisions.
Natasha Lekh
You can also set up our Content Checker with enabled Slack integration to notify you every time there’s a new entry on a specific part of this website, although it’s not designed for scraping it. You can also check out our other sport-specific scraper, Soccerstats Scraper, and see how that one works for you since it’s a bit more complex. Happy scraping and best of luck!
