Methodology

How appointments are recorded

Appointments are sourced from official federation and association publications — often released as “designazioni” or appointment notices — together with other public sources. Each appointment links a single official to a single match in a defined role. When a match has several officials, it is represented by several appointments, one per role.

Roles

We classify each appointment by the role the official held in the match:

Referee — the official in charge of the match.
Assistant Referee 1 / 2 — the officials on the touchlines who assist the referee, traditionally responsible for offside and ball-out-of-play decisions.
Fourth Official — the official managing the technical areas and substitutions, and acting as a reserve.
VAR — the Video Assistant Referee who reviews specified incidents.
AVAR — the Assistant Video Assistant Referee who supports the VAR.
Observer — an appointed assessor or referee observer who evaluates officiating performance.

Entities we track

Appointments connect a small set of core entities, which together form the structure of the platform:

Officials — the people who hold appointments.
Matches — individual fixtures, each belonging to a competition and season.
Competitions — the leagues, cups, and tournaments matches belong to.
Seasons — the time periods over which a competition runs.
Venues — the stadiums where matches are played, located in a city, which in turn belongs to a country.

How statistics are computed

Statistics are derived directly from the recorded appointments. We count the number of appointments an official has held, broken down by role, by competition, and by season.

Collaboration between two officials is measured as the number of matches in which both held an appointment. This drives the collaboration networks shown on the platform: officials who frequently share matches appear more strongly connected.

Data quality and normalization

Official names are normalized and de-duplicated across spelling variants so that a single person is represented by a single profile, even where sources spell their name differently. Scores are added to matches when they become available.

Limitations

We aim to be accurate and transparent, and that includes being honest about the limits of the data:

Coverage varies by competition and by era; not all competitions or historical periods are equally complete.
Future and knockout fixtures may list teams as “to be determined” until they are confirmed.
Scores and other match details are added when they are available and may lag the appointment record.
Despite normalization, occasional name or matching errors are possible.

Updates

The dataset is updated as new appointments are published. Where corrections are needed, records are revised to reflect the most accurate information available.