I engineered 102 leakage-free ML features from 49,000+ international football matches (1872–2026) and published it as a free dataset
Been working on a football prediction project and couldn't find a dataset that had
the actual context needed to model match outcomes — just raw results everywhere.
So I built one from scratch on top of the International Football Results dataset
by Mart Jürisoo (the well known one on Kaggle with 49,000+ matches going back to 1872).
What I added:
**Elo ratings** — built from scratch, updated after every single match across 150
years. Both teams' ratings, their difference, and the expected win probability
going into each match.
**Rolling form** — win rate, goals scored, goals conceded, goal difference, clean
sheet rate, both-teams-scored rate, scoring rate, and win streak. Computed at
three lookback windows: last 5, last 10, and last 20 matches. For both teams.
**Head-to-head history** — based on the last 10 meetings between those two specific
teams. Some teams have persistent edges over specific opponents that their general
form doesn't explain.
**Fatigue signals** — days since each team's last match and the difference between
the two.
**Penalty reliance** — fraction of each team's historical goals that came from
penalties, pulled from the goalscorer dataset.
**Shootout composure** — historical penalty shootout win rate for each team, from
the shootouts dataset.
**Tournament context** — World Cup, qualifier, friendly, neutral venue, competition
importance weight, confederation.
The thing I spent the most time on: every feature is computed in strict
chronological order using only data that existed before that match was played.
State updates happen after each row is recorded, never before. No lookahead,
no leakage anywhere in the 102 columns.
102 features total. 49,094 rows. result column (H/D/A) included as the label.
Drop date and result, plug into any classifier.
Dataset is fully documented with column descriptors for every feature.
Link: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/kriishgulati/football-match-results-1872-2026-with-ml-features
Built on top of the original dataset by Mart Jürisoo — full credit and link
in the dataset description.