[Understat] Team's stat unable to be read

[maris-volk]

Describe the bug
Unable to scrape the schedule from Understat. Either the data doesn't arrive at all, or there's a KeyError - 'statData'.

Affected scrapers
This affects the following scrapers:

• Understat

Code example

import soccerdata as sd
understat = sd.Understat(leagues='GER-Bundesliga', seasons='2526', no_cache=True)
match_data = understat.read_team_match_stats()

Error message

process data for Bundesliga..
[12/09/25 07:52:00] INFO     Saving cached data to               _common.py:263
                             C:\Users\MarsVilo\soccerdata\data\U               
                             nderstat                                          
error while process Bundesliga: 'statData'

or

Traceback (most recent call last):
  ———
  File "...\site-packages\soccerdata\understat.py", line 144, in read_seasons
    league_data = data["statData"]
                  ~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^
KeyError: 'statData'

Additional context
Literally less than a day ago everything was working.

Contributor Action Plan

• I’m not able to fix this issue.

[pres-2]

Same issue on my side. The cached data saved as json are empty.

[rontrim]

I'm running into the same issue. Did some digging and it looks like Understat isn't putting statData or datesData in the HTML anymore - it's all being loaded via JavaScript after the page loads.

import cloudscraper

scraper = cloudscraper.create_scraper()

# Homepage
response = scraper.get("https://understat.com/")
print('statData' in response.text)  # False

# League page
response = scraper.get("https://understat.com/league/EPL/2024")
print('datesData' in response.text)  # False

Both return 200 OK with valid HTML, but the JS variables the library is looking for just aren't there anymore. Only basic stuff like THEME and BASE_URL show up.

Seems like Understat changed their site to load data via AJAX instead of embedding it in the HTML, which breaks how the scraper currently works.

Versions:

• soccerdata version: 1.8.7
• Python: 3.11
• OS: Windows 11

[maris-volk]

Okay, so what can you recommend to get information on matches, XG, XGa, corners and yellow cards?

[rontrim]

Okay, so what can you recommend to get information on matches, XG, XGa, corners and yellow cards?

I use the fbref scraper functions provided to get that data. I also have other data in my pipeline coming from understat so this is still an issue for me that I don't know how to resolve.