[FBref] Optimize reading team match history by creating and reading from csv cache

[Kalaweksh]

Resolves

• 458

Changes

• Modified read_team_match_stats to cache match history tables as csv files for faster reading.

• Added force_cache parameter to read_team_match_stats for consistency with other methods.

Issues

• Currently does not detect if league seasons in the cache are not complete e.g la liga season 20-21 only cached up to matchweek 24. This can result in the silent returning of tables with missing data to the user in certain edge cases.

[probberechts]

Thank you for taking the time to submit this pull request. I really appreciate your effort for improving the project. Yet, I do not believe that this is a good solution. It is too ad hoc (I prefer a general solution for all FBref endpoints), will make things too complicated and does not really fit in the scope of soccerdata.

I see that storing the full HTML page is inefficient, but I am not a huge fan of caching the preprocessed data. Soccerdata is meant to be able to download and parse the data. It is (at least for now) not intended as a database system. How to store the data and make it quickly accessible is out of scope.

Rather, I see value in compacting the HTML page before caching it. For example by only keeping the tables.