Sports sites: live coverage, statistics and the gap between them

Sports on the web divides cleanly into three things that are easy to confuse: live scores and coverage, statistics and historical records, and opinion. Sites are usually good at one of the three and mediocre at the others, which is why most people end up with a small set of bookmarks rather than a single destination.

Statistics sites are the ones where quality differences are largest and hardest to see. The question worth asking is where the numbers come from and how far back they go. A site that carries official league data back several decades, and says so, is a different proposition from one scraping a feed with two seasons of history.

For live coverage, latency is the whole product. A scores site that is thirty seconds behind is useless to anyone watching, and no amount of design fixes that.

One thing to be alert to across this entire category: sports content and gambling advertising are deeply entangled, and a lot of what presents itself as analysis is written to drive betting activity. Sites that take gambling money are not necessarily worse, but they should say so, and the ones that do not disclose it are worth reading more sceptically.