Introducing OLTA

In January, Stats Perform pulled Opta's data license from FBref. For a decade, FBref was where serious fans went when FotMob's surface-level numbers weren't enough, where you could pull up a midfielder's progressive passes per 90, compare a striker's npxG to his actual goals, or sanity-check a transfer rumor with five clicks. That's gone.

If you're a Footy stats nerd you can go to X and see scouts using client accounts to generate some pretty cool data to drool over, but thats about it, some upstarts, but largely lacking in completeness.

What's left is a fragmented landscape: FotMob, SofaScore, Transfermarkt, Understat, WhoScored for ratings nobody fully trusts. None of them, together, are what football analytics in 2026 should or could be.

That's why we're building OLTA.football

What OTLA is

OTLA is a football analytics platform built for the people the industry has ignored: the prosumer / superfan tier.

The fans who read The Athletic, listen to Tifo, argue about pressing triggers on Bluesky, and want data that goes beyond xG without paying StatsBomb's enterprise rates. The semi-pro analysts, the scouts working two leagues down, the content creators who need numbers they can actually trust for YouTube videos.

Concretely, OTLA gives you:

• A four-phase Monte Carlo prediction engine. Not a single number, but a distribution. Run a match 300 times for free, 10,000 times if you want the full picture. See not just who wins, but how often the underdog draws, how often the game goes to penalties, how the scoreline probabilities cluster.
• Live match data, with analytics layered on top. Scores, events, and stats update in real time across all supported leagues. The difference is what we do with the feed: We recalculates as the match progresses, win probabilities shift on every meaningful event.
• Deep player profiles that combine Transfermarkt-style market context with analytical depth — percentile rankings across shooting, receiving, dribbling, progression via carries, progression via passes. Plus historical and cultural context that the spreadsheet sites won't give you.
• Head-to-head pages that aren't just a list of past results, but a genuine narrative — who's beaten whom, when, how, and what the data says about why.
• Scout Lab. Filter players by percentile across any dimension, build comparison sets, surface the second-tier names nobody's writing about yet.

We're launching for the World Cup, then will cover fully six leagues, Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ekstraklasa, MLS.

What OLTA isn't

A few things we want to be honest about upfront, because the analytics space is full of overpromises.

It's not a replacement for StatsBomb or Wyscout. Those are enterprise tools with enterprise data and enterprise prices. We're not pretending to be that.

It's not a live-scores app, even though it has live scores. FotMob and SofaScore have spent years polishing the live-match experience, push notifications, minute-by-minute commentary, lineup graphics, the works. We're not trying to out-FotMob FotMob on that. We ingest the same live data they do, but we surface it in service of analysis: live xPG, live win probability, live Monte Carlo re-simulation. If you want to follow the game minute-by-minute, you already have apps for that. If you want to understand the game minute-by-minute, that's where we're going.

It's not a tipster service. We surface probabilities because probabilities are how you should think about football. We are not a tipster service, we don't sell picks, and our prediction engine is not optimized to beat the closing line. If it helps your betting, fine. That's not what it's for.

It's not a live-scores app. FotMob does that well. We're not going to do it worse just to have feature parity.

It's not "AI for football" in the way 2025 made you tired of hearing. We use AI where it earns its keep, generating editorial context on player and matchup pages, the kind of historical and stylistic background a good football writer would give you if you had one on retainer. We do not use it to invent numbers, hallucinate stats, or wrap a wrapper around someone else's API and call it a product.

It's not free, fully. Most of the site is, we will try to keep it as free as possible but the data costs money and we need to cover costs. The math on building this sustainably only works if the people who get real value pay a small amount for it. Ads carry the base; subscriptions are how we will keep the lights on long-term for less than the cost of a starbucks coffee.

Why we're doing it

Two reasons, plain ones.

The first is timing. The FBref data outage created a vacuum, the 2026 World is a few six weeks away from being the biggest football event of the decade. Two windows like that don't open at the same time often, and when they do, you build, we may not make it in time, but we're trying, and well continue trying after the World Cup ends.

The second is taste. Every existing platform makes a choice about who it's for, and most of them choose the casual end or the enterprise end. Nobody is seriously building for the person who knows what a progressive pass is but doesn't have a corporate budget. That gap is where most of the interesting football conversations happen now, and the tooling for those conversations is bad. It's a real problem. We think we can fix it.

The name, by the way: OLTA stands for [OLTA = OnLine Tactical Analysis) Make of that what you will.

We expected more from football analytics. So we're building it.