How to Use the Sports Reference Linker

Picture this - with just a single click, you can hyperlink player names to Football Reference pages in your blogs, articles, bulletin board posts, and more. All you have to do is write up your post in the blog text box and click the bookmarklet in your browser. The tool grabs the text you wrote, runs it through our player linker, and returns the text with links enclosed.

Let's get started. If you have any questions along the way, contact us here.

Add The Bookmarklet | Player Linking Functionality | Currently Supported Webpages & Software | How to use the Player Linker with Blogs or Bulletin Boards | Add your site to our Player newsfeeds | Test The Bookmarklet

For FBref.com, the Linker will direct your users to the same language used on this page. Switch to a different language if you want the player links to direct your users to a different language.

There are two ways you can quickly add the Football Reference Player Linker bookmarklet to your browser.

Option 1: Click on, hold and drag this link to your bookmarks or bookmarks bar. This option works for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

Option 2: Right click this link and add it to your favorites or bookmarks. This option does not work for Chrome. Please note that if your browser asks you to confirm this action, this is standard to prevent security issues from untrustworthy sites.

Whichever option you choose, make sure to test to ensure the Player Linker is installed properly. Click here to test your Player Linker tool.

Running into trouble? Try editing the bookmark URL to match what is shown below. Note that there are encoded symbols (in the form of %X or %XX) listed below that may not appear when clicking edit. These are necessary for the bookmarklet in some browsers.

• Player names will be bolded and linked automatically.
• Names with multiple associated players will go to the search engine results for that name or to the most common choice for that name.
• Search is by longest names to shortest names
• No matching will occur across hard line returns.
• A name with a </a> after it will not be matched, so it won't overwrite existing links.

• Step 1: Save your draft
• Step 2: Change to HTML view, if needed
• Step 3: Click the Player Linker bookmarklet
• Step 4: Working should appear and will disappear when all of the player names have been hyperlinked.

Need assistance? Contact us anytime!

Before you get started, please save any work prior to using the bookmarklet. We have made a serious effort to protect your content, but cannot make any guarantees.

When using the Player Linker with blogs or bulletin boards, you must click the bookmarklet while composing in the "Edit HTML", "Rich Text", or "Compose" view.

If you're mostly writing Visual view, feel free to do so and then switch to the HTML view before clicking on your bookmarklet.

• Substack Newsletters
• WordPress
• TypePad
• Joomla
• MovableType Enterprise 4 (may also work in 5, but have not tested)
• phpBB
• invision
• vBulletin
• Xenforo
• Don't see what you're looking for? Request support for other software.

Want to see your content appear on our Player Pages? You may have noticed that each Football Reference player page has Player section. Here's how your articles can appear there.

• Step 1: Follow the instructions above to use our Player Linker or Statistics Sharing tool.
• Step 2: Fill out this brief form to let us know you would like to be included. A member of our team will review your request in less than two business days.
• Step 3: Once accepted, we will start scanning your RSS feed for links to Football-Reference.com These articles will begin showing up on the relevant player page under, Player News.

In most cases, we will match on any of the top level players on the site, but for sports with a large number of players, we may only match on the most popular players. This is usually limited to the top 50,000 people. You can also hand-link players who are less popular.

Also, we do match diacritics like "Mario Mandžukić", but we will also try to match "Mario Mandzukic" and get that linked. However, a partially correct rendering, like “Mario Mandzukić“ may not get linked.

Players known by a single name like "Isco", "Neymar", "Marta", "Jo", and "Fred" are difficult for our system to match as a name like "Joe Hart" may first correctly match the English goalkeeper, but then also get matched to the Brazilian Jo. To manage this issue, we only match mononyms when they are wrapped by underscores.

So if you are writing an article for the first entry for Hulk, you will want to write it as _Hulk_. For example:

Hulk was a forward for Zenit
    will need to be written as
_Hulk_ was a forward for Zenit

for a link to appear in your text.

We will then match this name and also remove the underscores when wrapping the name in the appropriate link. We apologize for this inconvenience, but it is the only way we can manage to link these one-word names.