UFC fans know that the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is one of the industry’s biggest and most powerful organizations. Over the past two decades, the UFC has undergone many changes. As long as the best MMA has been able to test their skills against each other, one thing has remained constant: the event has always been a place where they can test their skills against each other. Many big names in the MMA compete in the UFC today. Statistics and analytics are becoming more accessible to fans as their popularity grows. This article will explain how to scrape UFC stats from their official website, allowing you to nerd out like never before!

What Is Web Scraping?

Web Scraping involves the automatic extraction of data and the collection of information. You can collect more data from one or more websites by scraping them. A quick, scalable, and automated method can replace the time-consuming, often tedious process of manually copying and pasting website content into a document.

UFC Stats - What Are They, And How Are They Measured?

A mixed martial arts competition known as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) takes place worldwide. There have been 390 events and 4058 matches around the globe as of the date of my data scraping. UFC stats analyze statistics about UFC events. It is possible to scrape UFC stats by analyzing the data.

The UFC uses the original Fight Metric system to record fight-level data. A package called ufc_stats contains a data.frame. It is the same as the fight statistics available on the official UFC Stats website but organized. UFC_stats contains the UFC fighter record in a single round. There are a total of 37 variables in the data.frame.

The Purpose of Scraping UFC Stats

Sports fans may have the answers to these questions. Besides, discussing the reasons for scraping UFC statistics is still essential.

  • Statistics of Superior Striking

Striking stats are the most important factor for a UFC fighter to win a fight inside the cage in 2020. It’s a high percentage of the time that the fighter with better average strikes in a ufc fight career striking stats than the opponent wins a fight.

You’ll usually have a winner if one fighter has a better advantage in more striking categories than the other (usually). UFCStats.com provides a detailed statistical preview of every upcoming UFC fight, so you can easily get these stats.

  • Go With the Graph

Despite the excitement of betting on underdogs, you should do so wisely. If you want to win a bet, go with the betting favorite, no matter how boring it may seem. Interestingly, the favorites have won precisely two-thirds of their fights this year (207 victories for the favorites and 106 victories for the dogs).

This is where other factors I am analyzing, such as striking statistics, play a role. Three to four dogs are usually hit on a UFC fight card. To understand them, you need to know who they are. It is worth noting that only 37 of the 106 upset victories this year were over +200 on the board. The best bet is to go with slight underdogs.

  • Avoid Overweight Fighters

Mixed martial arts is not necessarily about the action inside the cage that is the most brutal and dangerous. It is what happens in the days leading up to it. During that time, competitors cut their weight in an archaic manner.

Taking the scale at their contracted weight limit before the fight means eliminating all excess water and weight from their bodies. During the hours before the fight, they put the weight back on.

It is best to avoid fighting overweight fighters on weigh-in day (the day before the fight). When they step into the cage, the prevailing thought is “bigger is better.”. If you see someone coming in heavy, bet their opponent if they are missing weight this year.

  • Avoid Late Replacements

Scheduled fights often fall through at the last minute, especially during this pandemic. A fighter’s withdrawal may leave a gap in the UFC’s roster, but the organization is usually good at scrambling and finding replacements.

  • Great Grappling Stats

We’re back at UFCStats.com, this time looking at a fighter’s grappling stats. The importance of striking over grappling appears far more significant about winning.

Fighters with superior grappling stats have an advantage heading into a fight, but it’s much smaller than the striking advantage - they win 61% of the time. In any case, if it’s a toss-up, pick the grappler with more experience.

Where Could You Scrape UFC Data?

We need to understand the use of sports stats before we can answer this question. There are two types of sports statistics: Performance Analytics and Market Value Analytics. The former will affect the latter.

UFC performance analysis requires tables, results, fixtures, and standings. Market value analytics requires information from social media sites or portals aside from the above-mentioned information to evaluate their social influence.

Different Ways to Scrape UFC Data?

This article shows you how to scrape UFC data from different platforms instead of giving you a step-by-step tutorial for scraping UFC data from one particular website.

  • Table Information Scraping

Using the same scraping workflow, we can also scrape the official UFC website or any third-party website that displays UFC data. UFC Stats and Kaggle provide players’ and teams’ stats in a table.

  • Social Media Data Scraping

Social media platforms are also essential for discovering what fans say about UFC stars or games. Twitter or other social media platforms allow you to see how they reacted the first time.

Businessman consulting legal expert on scraping UFC stats

There are general laws that protect personal information, although it is imperative to consider your local laws and how you intend to use the information. Scraping public data from a website is not illegal.

You can copy and paste data from web scrapers to save time. On some sites, information is also accessible through APIs. For your web scraping tool to be useful, it should have the ability to rotate IP addresses and use proxy servers.

Best Way to Scrape UFC Data

To find information they need on a website, web scrapers use special web retrieval and parsing technologies designed to find the data they need on the website.

There are several ways to retrieve Web pages. Still, one common method involves using an HTML web crawler or agent, which looks at all the web content available to a specific URL and can retrieve all the pages that are available from that URL. Once the web scraper has collected all the relevant information from the website, such as text and images, it sends the information to the server.

It is also imperative to consider several other factors when calculating the frequency of particular information about posts on social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Several factors contribute to the layout or design of a page. If you do this, you’ll get more accurate information about how often a piece of data posts.

Steps of Data Scraping

We understand the purpose of a web scraping bot. The solution is more than executing it and hoping for the best! This guide will focus on the basics of carrying out these steps, irrespective of the tools you use.

  • Sign up for a free account at the Crawlbase website
Crawlbase signup screen
  • Paste this code snippet into any Integrated Development Environment (or IDE). We will not use JavaScript or premium parameters to imitate real browsers for demonstration purposes only.
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from urllib.request import urlopen
from urllib.parse import quote_plus
import json

url = quote_plus('http://www.ufcstats.com/statistics/events/completed')

handler = urlopen('https://api.crawlbase.com/scraper?token=your_token&url=' + url)

print(json.loads(handler.read()))

  • After creating an account, view the parameter documentation for the Crawling API https://crawlbase.com/docs/crawling-api/parameters/#token and replace your private token with your_token in the code.

  • Now we have our code snippet and private token (don’t share it with anyone). Let’s run the code to retrieve data of UFC stats.

Visual Studio Code screenshot of scraping UFC stats

You can use this guide to scrape UFC Stats step-by-step. It doesn’t require enormous infrastructure costs, management, or scaling. You can get specific UFC finishing stats in specific time with a few more lines of code. If you’d like us to publish more of this, write to us.

Best Web Scraping Tools You Can Use To Scrape The Web for UFC Stats

The purpose of web scraping tools is to extract data from websites. Other names for these tools include web extraction tools and web reaping tools. Anyone trying to gather information from the Internet can benefit from these tools. This method of information passage can be simple composing or copying and pasting.

  1. Crawlbase

Scraping data from the web using Crawlbase is simple and easy for programmers and non-programmers. You can scrape web information at a huge scale (up to millions) and download it in organized formats like Excel, CSV, and JSON. There is a free arrangement for clients, and an initial subscription is available.

Developers and organizations can use the Crawlbase API to scrape websites with the Crawlbase API safely. We can scrape JavaScript pages with HTML, use automated browsers, avoid human testing, and handle proxy servers.

  1. Scraping-Bot

Scraping-Bot.io is an application that allows for scraping information from a URL proficiently. Depending on your scraping needs, it provides you with APIs for recovering raw HTML, scraping retail sites, and scraping property postings from land websites.

  1. Extract.io

Extract.io scrapes and compiles the information into business-ready formats. This versatile information extraction software can scrape and construct web information, web-based media posts, PDFs, text archives, authentic information, and even messages.

  1. ParseHub

The ParseHub web scraping tool is free to use. The high-level web scraper allows you to extract information quickly by tapping the information you need. You can download scratched information in any configuration for examination, which is exceptional compared to other information scraping tools.

  1. Mozenda

You can extract text, images, and PDF content from website pages with Mozenda. Compared to other web scrapers, it helps you sort out and prepare UFC fighter records for publishing.

Concluding Remarks

Male boxer boxing punching bag for UFC stats

The study’s baseline needs to start with scraped data from the Internet to get a clear picture of scraping UFC stats and data analytics. There is a very simple reason for this. On the Internet, you can find a wide variety of information about almost every sporting event and athlete. Besides, you can find the continuous updating of these statistics as the latest information is available. With the ability to scrape this data in real-time, you can create solutions using the latest data to paint the most accurate picture.

It is a matter of pride for our team at Crawlbase to go the extra mile to ensure that our customers can scrape any data from the web. We can provide you with the data in a consumable format if you want to analyze player metrics or their social media highlights to help you decide which would be most beneficial to your team.