FotMob vs SofaScore (2026): Which Is Actually Better?

Quick Verdict

For the vast majority of football fans, FotMob is the better choice in 2026. It is cleaner, faster, cheaper to go ad-free, and its feature set has never been stronger — the recent addition of free heatmaps in Version 225 closed the last major gap between the two apps. Its 4.7-star rating on the Google Play Store across 721,000 reviews, compared to SofaScore's 4.0 across 1.1 million, tells a clear story about day-to-day user satisfaction.

That said, SofaScore is the right choice for specific users: serious bettors who rely on its dropping odds and H2H streaks, multi-sport fans who need a single app for basketball, tennis, and cricket alongside football, and — critically — followers of women's football, where SofaScore's coverage is in a different league entirely.

The Two Apps: A Brief History

FotMob was founded in Norway and launched as a side project — famously conceived on a honeymoon. It has grown to over 20 million monthly active users, remaining football-only and fiercely focused on the matchday experience. Its design philosophy has always prioritised clarity and speed over feature density.

SofaScore, founded in Croatia in 2010, took the opposite approach: maximum coverage across maximum sports. It now covers 25+ sports, 5,000+ leagues, and 150,000+ players. Its ambition is to be the single sports data app you will ever need. This breadth comes at a cost — the app is more complex, and its quality across sports is uneven.

For years, the two apps were genuinely differentiated. SofaScore had heatmaps and more granular stats; FotMob had better design and a more curated experience. In late 2025, FotMob shipped heatmaps — described by the team as “the most requested feature in FotMob history” — and the gap narrowed considerably. The question now is whether SofaScore's remaining advantages are enough to justify its significantly higher premium price.

Heatmaps: The Latest Battleground

For a long time, heatmaps were SofaScore's most-cited advantage. The feature — which shows where a player spent their time on the pitch during a match — was available on SofaScore from the start of the 2025/26 season, free to all users. FotMob users had been requesting it for years.

In Version 225, released in February 2026, FotMob finally delivered. The app store changelog and social media announcements were characteristically understated: "We got heatmaps!" Like SofaScore's implementation, FotMob's heatmaps are free for all users, not locked behind a premium subscription. You can access them directly from a player's match stats page.

SofaScore's heatmaps are more mature — they have had a full season to be refined — and are available across a wider range of leagues and competitions, including women's football. FotMob's implementation is newer and currently has more limited league coverage for the feature. For the top five European leagues and major competitions, both apps now offer comparable heatmap experiences.

Player Ratings: Algorithm vs. Algorithm

Both apps produce proprietary player ratings after every match, and both are a constant source of debate. Neither company publishes the full methodology behind their algorithms, which makes it difficult to validate them objectively.

The general consensus on Reddit and in football communities is that FotMob's ratings tend to feel more intuitive. They appear to weight defensive contributions and off-ball work more fairly, and are less prone to rewarding players who accumulate volume stats (touches, passes) without meaningful impact. SofaScore's ratings are perceived as more volatile — a player can receive a 6.2 for a solid defensive performance that FotMob would rate a 7.0.

There is also a well-documented bias in both systems toward high-profile players at top clubs. As one Reddit user put it: “Fotmob has favorites like Salah and Cristiano. No matter how bad either one is, they'll still get a decent score because the children would [vote them up regardless].” Both apps incorporate some form of user voting or community signal, which introduces this popularity bias. Neither app is a substitute for proper event-level data analysis.

Data Sources & Accuracy

FotMob's data pipeline has undergone a significant change in 2025. The company previously relied on a mix of data providers for its physical metrics (distance covered, sprint speeds), and suffered a high-profile outage when that data source became unavailable. In May 2025, Stats Perform announced that its Opta Vision tracking data — the same provider used by broadcasters and professional clubs — would be integrated into FotMob. This is a meaningful upgrade: Opta Vision is the gold standard for physical and positional data, and its arrival on a consumer app is significant.

SofaScore's data sourcing is less transparent. The company operates its own large data collection operation, with a network of scouts and data entry operators covering thousands of leagues globally. This is how it achieves its extraordinary breadth — no single commercial data provider covers 5,000+ leagues. The trade-off is consistency: data quality for top leagues is excellent, but for lower-tier competitions it can be patchy and delayed.

For the major European leagues and international competitions, both apps are highly reliable. FotMob's Opta partnership gives it a slight edge in data provenance for top-flight football. SofaScore's advantage is sheer coverage depth for the long tail of global football.