What is EUFO?

On eufo.de visitors can find information about football players and their affiliated clubs. The EUFO database with squads of European football clubs reaches back to season 1998–99. Initially focus was set on the big European leagues, but nowadays the database includes squads of almost all European countries. The name EUFO derives from European football.

Who are behind EUFO?

EUFO is a spare time project of Dennis Grebasch and Michael Woile that has been running for 24 years thank to countless supporters and contributors. EUFO thrives from its active user base and anyone can help improving the data further.

Dennis Grebasch (44): "My responsibility is the design and maintenance of EUFO's database and website. As a Business Informatics specialist I like to structure huge amounts of data, and the football data on EUFO is perfect for trying out new things. Although originating from Northern Germany, VfB Stuttgart has been my favourite team since 1987. That also explains why Jürgen Klinsmann became my favourite player early on.

Michael Woile (47): My role is to coordinate the collection and publication of EUFO's data. Every season it's a new challenge to compile all European first leagues. But with the great support we get from our visitors, even the Caucasus countries are manageable by now. Eintracht Braunschweig is my favourite club, and I attend their home matches regularly since my days in school.

How did it all begin?

EUFO originates from small handwritten booklets, in which Michael had collected squad data of European football clubs since 1994. Since every single player transfer was written by hand and the old team erased, the booklet became soon non-readable. Eventually Michael decided to organize the data with his Amiga computer of that time. In November 1996 he moved his database to a Pentium PC, but only when it got connected to the internet in January 1999, a lot of great new possibilities in collecting data and co-operating with others opened up.

At the same time Dennis made his first steps in creating own websites with a fan page for ANSTOSS 2, a football mangement game of German publisher Ascaron. The developers included an editor module to the game, which enabled not only keeping the player data up to date but also exporting the data and sharing it with others.

Michael soon discovered the data on Dennis' website, became interested in the project and offered his help. Instead of only offering the data for download, we decided to publish it online, which was the birth moment of EUFO. On 25th April 1999 EUFO saw the light of internet, at first on free ad-sponsored webspace. Already after one year disk space was running short, and so we decided to buy our own domain. eufo.de went online in May 2000, and at the same time the layout was changed and the content was expanded even further.

The database has been developed continuously over years, evolving from a standalone desktop application to a distributed web system. The website with its static HTML pages has only been changed gradually every now and then until the big relaunch on 2nd October 2010.