As of December 18, 2019, the dorukakan.com football site, available at dorukakan.com/football/football.php, is live.
Over the past several years, I have had several aborted attempts at creating a website. I’ve dabbled at creating personal portals, sketching out numerous designs on paper, and built a few simple utilities for activities like tracking book collections and rating whisky. It was never really my ambition to create a finished product. Instead, the process alone was sufficient: a pleasant diversion to maintain basic programming skills and explore a particular topic of interest.
Over those years, I have had several aborted attempts at creating this website. This particular website was first conceived when I pondered what a table of the Istanbul clubs would look like when only including the matches among the three. And so began many years of searching for data, then scraping and parsing, parsing and scraping, with no real end in sight. But, eventually, toward the beginning of the 2018/19 season, I was able to build enough momentum to move from basic prototyping to the goal of a production-ready site. In many ways, I got lucky with finding the data in the particular format I found it in – and that fortuity was just the necessary impetus the complete this initiative.
What then is this website? It is a collection of various statistics and information, metrics that are out of the ordinary, an exploration into the interesting trends of football data. It is, hopefully, a beginning as I plan on exploring more avenues in the data. What other ways can we evaluate goal-scorers? Is there anything predictive about these metrics or do they operate only as gems of curiosity (nothing wrong with that)? The original purpose and, now that the site is live, the enduring one is all about pondering a question and then diving into the data to see if answers are within.