Derbyist is an up-to-date match calendar of football derbies and rivalries, historical results, and video highlights.
I made it because I couldn’t find anything like it. While I mainly follow the Premier League, I’m interested in tuning into La Liga or Bundesliga games when there’s a famous derby on, but I couldn’t find an easy way to know when they were on.
(For the uninitiated, a football derby is a highly charged match between longstanding rival teams, typically from the same city or region.)
How It Works
I manually compiled a list of significant derbies around the world and I store the derby name, teams, country, and other details in an SQLite database. I then query the TheSportsDB’s football API to see if there are any upcoming games between any of the derby pairs in my database. If there’s a hit, it’s added to the database in a table of matches.
If a match has a date in the future, it appears on the home page, which is the calendar of upcoming matches. If it’s in the past, it will show up on the individual page for that derby. Once a game is in the past I regularly query TheSportsDB’s API until I get the final score and a link to the video highlights and I add those to my database.
One of the reason I chose TheSportsDB as my data provider is that its data is crowdsourced, and as a subscriber I can contribute data myself. This means that if they don’t have the video link for a match (especially common for smaller leagues), I can just find it and contribute it myself, which then trickles down to my site. So at least once a week I’ll run a script that shows me the finished matches in my database that don’t yet have a video link. I then take a few minutes to find them and add them to my site and simultaneously contribute to the community.
Newsletter + Reddit
Since I have all this data, I also offer a free newsletter that goes out each Monday and includes the coming week’s derbies and the results of the prior week’s derbies with links to the video highlights. I also post that same content to r/soccer on Reddit. Both of these are automated systems just generate the messages and send them out via Reddit’s API and Buttondown’s API for email.
Last updated October 17, 2025
