Loading article…
The Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation (RSSSF) is an international organisation dedicated to collecting statistics about football, aiming to build an exhaustive archive of the related information from around the world.
The RSSSF website contains football-related statistics in the form of lists without commentary and it is maintained by volunteer contributors.[1] It is considered one of "the most complete" publicly available statistical football databases in the world, and has extensive information on games and line-ups.[2] According to its founders, this enterprise was created in January 1994[3] by three regulars of the Rec.Sport.Soccer (RSS) Usenet newsgroup: Lars Aarhus, Kent Hedlundh, and Karel Stokkermans. It was originally known as the "North European Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation", but the geographical reference was dropped as its membership from other regions grew.
The RSSSF has members and contributors from all around the world and has spawned seven spin-off projects to more closely follow the leagues of that project's home country. The spin-off projects are dedicated to Albania, Brazil, Denmark, Norway, Romania, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Egypt. In November 2002, the Polish service 90minut.pl became the official branch of RSSSF Poland.[4]
The Rec.Sport.Soccer Player of the Year Award was an annual football award presented by the organisation. First presented in 1992, the readers of the newsgroup voted in a format similar to that of the France FootballBallon d'Or award. It recognised the best player in the world and was discontinued after the 2005 edition.[5] Brazil's Ronaldinho was the last ever winner, in 2005.
