About

Who made this, and how to reuse it

An independent, single-question reference project: every Portland Timbers player, across all four incarnations of the club, who appeared in one of Europe's big five top divisions.

The project

Transfermarkt, FBref, worldfootball and Soccerbase all hold the raw material for this question, but none of them lets you ask it directly — you would have to cross-reference four Portland squad histories against five league archives by hand. This site is that cross-reference, done once and published with its sources attached.

It covers 44 qualifying players and documents 28 near misses: names commonly assumed to belong on the list, each with the specific reason it falls outside the inclusion rules. Every figure on every page links to the page it came from. Where no source could confirm a number, the cell reads n.a. rather than carrying an estimate.

Who compiled it

Built and maintained by Sean C in Hillsboro, Oregon — an independent project, not affiliated with the Portland Timbers, Major League Soccer, the NASL or any league or broadcaster. Research compiled 30 August 2026; this build 2026-08-31.

Licence and reuse

The compiled dataset — the roster, the near-miss list, and the appearance and goal figures as organised here — is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, adapt and build on it, including commercially, as long as you credit this site. Suggested attribution:

Timbers in the Big Five — Sean C, https://timbersbigfive.neocities.org, CC BY 4.0

The licence covers this compilation, not the underlying records. Individual facts belong to the sources cited beside them, and those sources set their own terms — check them before republishing at scale. Machine-readable copies live at players.csv, players.json and near_misses.csv. The CSVs are the source of truth; every page here is generated from them.

Corrections

Corrections are welcome and wanted, particularly for the 1975–82 NASL and 1985–90 revival years, where per-season records are thinnest. The most useful report names the player, the figure that is wrong, the figure it should be, and a source that states it. Anything accepted lands in the changelog below with the date it changed.

Known limits

• Career top-flight appearance totals are league appearances at the clubs listed. They exclude domestic cups, European competition and second-tier seasons.
• worldfootball.net files all pre-1992 English top-flight appearances under “Premier League” and second-tier ones under “Championship”. Figures taken from there were read with that quirk in mind.
• Where two reliable sources disagree, the player page reports both.
• MLS-era rows drift with every transfer window. The changelog records each refresh.