Getting started with matchpointR

Overview

matchpointR turns the public pages of wtatennis.com into tidy data frames:

Function	Purpose
`wta_player_url()`	Build canonical player URLs.
`wta_get_player_basics()`	One-row tibble with bio parsed from the page’s JSON-LD.
`wta_get_player_overview()`	Career highlights (ranks, titles, prize money).
`wta_get_player_matches()`	One row per match across the full career.
`wta_get_rankings()`	Current singles / doubles leaderboard.

Every function that hits the network opens (and closes) its own headless Chrome session through chromote. Where the WTA site exposes structured schema.org JSON-LD data, matchpointR reads from that in preference to CSS selectors — this is substantially more resilient against site redesigns.

A worked example: Kateřina Siniaková

url <- wta_player_url(320301, "katerina-siniakova")

bio <- wta_get_player_basics(url, download_images = FALSE)
bio

download_images = TRUE (the default) additionally downloads the headshot into a magick-image list-column — set it to FALSE when you only need the metadata.

Career highlights

wta_get_player_overview(url)

Returns a long tibble with one row per metric: singles_rank, doubles_rank, singles_career_titles, doubles_career_titles, career_prize_money, career_high.

Full match history

matches_url <- wta_player_url(320301, "katerina-siniakova", "matches")
matches <- wta_get_player_matches(matches_url)
head(matches)

wta_get_player_matches() clicks the Show more button repeatedly until no more matches are loaded. Raise max_clicks only if you hit the safety cap on a very long career.

Tour-wide data

Live rankings

wta_get_rankings("singles", top = 50)
wta_get_rankings("doubles", top = 50)

Tips

Coercion. All columns are returned as character to stay faithful to the rendered page. Cast to numeric/date downstream.
Selector drift. If a function suddenly returns zero rows, the site’s CSS classes have probably been renamed — open an issue.
Rate limiting. chromote hits the site as a real browser; be considerate if you are iterating over many players.

Not yet covered

Tour-wide statistics leaderboards (aces, winners, break-points converted, …) are tracked in issue #1 for a future release. The WTA site reshuffled its /stats hub and we are waiting for a stable URL pattern before committing to an API.