The arrival on the first team scene of such a large number of young players in the last few weeks has left many people scrambling for statistics.

There was a concerted effort in the Vicarage Road Media Suite after Saturday’s win over Blackpool to find out the last Watford player who had come from the Academy to score on their league debut before Tobi Adeyemo.

Then there was the hunt for the club’s youngest goalscorers and first-team players.

Therefore it is perfectly timed that fans (and journalists!) now have access to a brilliant online resource which has now been refreshed and updated.

The Watford Football Club Archive at watfordfcarchive.co.uk, is a factual and statistical record of the entire history of Watford Football Club.

The website was the work of the late, great Trefor Jones, whose two books – The Watford Football Club Illustrated Who’s Who and Watford Season by Season – formed a remarkable and definitive record of the club’s history, documenting every player who’d made a first team appearance and the details of every fixture respectively.

All of that information was transferred by Trefor onto the original version of the site.

Trefor sadly passed away in June 2019, and the website was inherited by Matt Rowson, Steve Brown and Ian Grant with his blessing.

Since then, they’ve been working to adapt the site, with the aim both of making it easier to update regularly and making the information more accessible to those who want to search and browse it all.

That work has involved extracting the information from Trefor’s PDF documents in order to put into a database.

To do this, they’ve used extensive development undertaken by Ian in his role as Technical Director at CommunitySites, who have also given it all a smart new look.

The trio have been greatly assisted by Nicholas Ralph, whose comprehensive fixture spreadsheets have enabled them to finish about a year earlier than anticipated.

The archive team are also grateful for the support and patience of Richard Walker and Dave Messenger at Watford Football Club.

This all means they are now proud to present the new version of the Watford FC Archive.

As before, it contains extensive details of each season from 1881/82 to 2021/22, inclusive, including line-ups; a biographical and career account of every player who has appeared in a competitive first-team match; coverage of all the managers; and a feature on each opposing club which includes the results of every meeting.

Those details can now be searched in all kinds of mind-bending ways to while away a long away trip or fill the void in a blank midweek.

So you can find out gems like every player to have played for Watford in the Anglo-Italian Cup, who has managed Watford in the fourth tier of English football and how many times Troy Deeney was used as a substitute on a Wednesday!

For the moment there will be one large update per year, in the close season. All data is up to date now as of June 30, 2022. That means Adeyemo will have to wait to be added until the summer!

It really is a treasure trove for Watford fans, and definitely worth a good trawl around – just make sure you go there when you have time, as it can consume you!