Using R to Harvest and Process Soccer Data

There is a huge amount of soccer-related data on the Internet that is freely available. However, getting this data loaded into R can be a major challenge. Fortunately, R has many useful tools that can be employed to harvest and process data from the Internet. In this chapter, we investigate how to get soccer data into R so that it can be analysed and processed. In particular, the chapter discusses: importing, editing, and exporting comma-separated values files; dealing with missing or corrupted data; importing data files directly from the Internet; and harvesting soccer data from the Internet. The methods outlined aim to equip the reader with the knowledge and expertise required to competently import and process data from the Internet.