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Are you tired of waiting for the same old TV analysts to grace you with a few measly stats about your favorite football team? Don’t you wish you could take on those know-it-all fans of rival teams and shut them up once and for all with the indisputable facts? With Haddaf, you’ll get all the stats and data you need about your team or any team, updated around the clock, and in Arabic!

The Jordan-based Haddaf is ushering Arab fans into the age of professional sports stats.The website provides football fans and sports writers in the Arabic-speaking world with all the data on local, national, regional, and international teams, allowing them to better evaluate their performance and make informed predictions on upcoming matches.

Hit Me with the Stats

Haddaf provides 'Match Events' - raw data which is then used to produce statistics thanks to algorithms and formulas. This includes game scores, goal scorers, goal timings, player bookings, etc., from clubs and national teams across continents. The platform collects additional, more complex statistics including team average possession, number of attacks, number of dangerous attempts, and team aggression.

Performances of coaches are also tracked, based on winning percentages and the strength of their team’s attack and defense year in year out. As for players, the system calculates the number of goals every player has scored, the number of times they opened the scoring in a game, the number of match-winning goals, team wins when they are in the lineup, etc.

Meet the Playmakers

Co-founders Omar and Kasim Mufti first registered the website in 2013, setting the wheels in motion for a project that would translate their lifelong obsession and passion for football. It took the two brothers a year and a half to build their site. They named it haddaf, which is an Arabic term for a prolific goal scorer or striker in football.

Prior to this, the pair had launched Fu6bol, a football blog whose articles and previews focused heavily on stats and analytics. Work on that first site led them to explore the idea of building a software capable of generating statistics and data metrics from raw data.

Haddaf is the first and only company that provides a football data feed in the region and in Arabic,using XML, a common computer language standard. It recently reached the final round of the 9th edition of the MIT Enterprise Forum Arab Startup Competition.

Towards Greener Pastures

Haddaf has only recently started commercializing their services - selling raw data to other football websites and organizations, as well as signing a deal with a football agency for the same purpose. It is also currently in negotiations with two Jordanian companies who are looking to use the football feed on their own websites and mobile applications.

According to Omar “In the Arab world, the true market is in the GCC.” He noted that raw data is not provided for football websites and portals in the MENA region. “Our potential market also includes European Football websites who are currently buying their feed from foreign companies.”

 “We are yet to approach football clubs, as our data needs to become slightly more comprehensive for the clubs to be able to use. We are currently working on widening our scope of statistics and data in the hope of approaching football clubs and football federations as well,” he added.