What started out as an attempt to manage my son's past, present and future football matches in Google's Calendar, has now led to this online searchable database on Watford's matches dating back to 1898.
The Google Calendar had some odd restrictions on what was "searchable" in the calendar, so I decided to write something that made it easy to search past football matches.
Using Trefor Jones's excellent archive at www.watfordfcarchive.co.uk as a base, I have added supplementary data to allow
for a host of search terms and immediate return of, hopefully, useful data.
For more information on what you can search for, please see the help section
The website, in it's most basic form, has been up and running since 2018. Whilst being slightly clunky looking in it's original design, it served a purpose and worked very well. The recent resedign (2022), which is hopefully has a cleaner and smarter look, has been complimented by the addition of separate pages allowing you to see more stats on players, partnerships, managers, seasons, cup runs and opposition. I have also improved the "mobile" view for when you're in need of a certain stat whilst on the move (although it will never be perfect due to the multitude of different screen sizes on phones, ipads, tablets, etc)
It would be great to have a searchable database like this for more than just Watford. Ideally, a website that allowed immediate, useful searching of games, results, players etc would be very useful. Of course this would be a massive job but... the data that is needed for is just not "out there" in the public domain. So unless you are a club, or a supporter with your hands on the required data, then I am afraid this is unlikely to happen. If you are, please gimme a shout
The site is written in PHP with a MySQL database and is hosted by the excellent Krystal Hosting And for those wondering how the website gets updated so quickly after each match, it happens semi-automatically using a clever bit of magic, crossed-fingers, a following wind and more importantly, the match updates supplied to me by Jon Sinclair (owner/webmaster at wfc.net)