Welcome to the Scuff Podcast where we talk about US Soccer. Our guest today is the guy who started the company that runs several of the

world's highest traffic sports stat websites and launched

fb ref.com the site most germane to our podcast in 2018.

He originally started baseball reference in 2000 loading data from CD-ROMs onto the internet. He's an Iowa native. He's been a patron of

scuff since 2019, so as long as pretty much anyone, and he runs sports reference from a

building at a church in Philadelphia.

Sean Foreman, welcome to Scuffed.

Thank you for happening.

It's great to be here.

First of all, I just want to thank you for your work.

I think that I asked the people in the discord for questions and several of the questions were just thank you Sean for launching FB ref making it so much more fun to be a soccer fan.

Well, I'm very lucky that people like a lot of the same things that I like. So I get to do these things and people respond positively to them.

So it's, uh, it's really good for my ego.

It's, uh, it's a lot of fun to do this so I really enjoy it.

Good good. Now you grew up in Western Iowa right? Can you tell us about your upbringing and how you got into sports and math?

Sure. So I grew up in a very small town in Western Iowa called Manning, Iowa. It's about 1,500 people.

I had 33 in my high school class when I graduated.

My dad was the football coach in town, and so he would bring his stats books home on Friday nights after the games that being a third or

fourth grader I would I would pour over them start calculating how many rushing

yards different people had and and just always I was always really enjoyed math and

was good at math and so those two things kind of came together you know in my

interest I was the guy at the fantasy draft who had the crazy spreadsheet,

...