Webscraping FBRef for Individual Player Stats in R

I am attempting to webscrape FBRef for individual players stats but I have encountered a problem I am unable to solve.

Let's say I have a list of just 2 players, Marcus Rashford and Erling Haaland. So ordinarily I would take each players name and convert it to the relevant URL, something like https://fbref.com/en/players/matchlogs/2022-2023/Marcus-Rashford-Match-Logs and then scrape it.

However the URL contains some random stuff which I dont know how to generate i.e.
https://fbref.com/en/players/a1d5bd30/matchlogs/2022-2023/Marcus-Rashford-Match-Logs
https://fbref.com/en/players/1f44ac21/matchlogs/2022-2023/Erling-Haaland-Match-Logs

The issue is I dont know how to automatically determine the a1d5bd30 and 1f44ac21 parts as they appear random.

I have webscraped basketball stats from the same website however that part of the URL is very simple as it is just the first letter of the players last name eg https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/b/brownke03/gamelog/2023/

Does anyone know how to solve my problem please or has anyone scraped this data successfully before?

Many thanks

You can use FBREF search.

Single matches will return a response with redirection, the example bellow collects those locations from response headers without actually following redirects (req_options(followlocation = FALSE)) , it will save you a few requests if you want to modify the URL anyway. If the search returns 0 or multiple players, missing Loaction header will result as NULL in returned list.

req_throttle(1) sets request rate to 1/s.

library(httr2)
library(purrr)

# "Marcus" - page with multiple matches
# "Super Mario" - no match
players <- c("Marcus Rashford", "Erling Haaland", "Marcus", "Super Mario")

set_names(players) |>
  map(\(player) request("https://fbref.com/en/search/search.fcgi") |>
        req_url_query(search = player) |> 
        req_options(followlocation = FALSE) |>
        req_throttle(1) |>
        req_perform() |> 
        resp_header("Location")
      , .progress = TRUE)
#> ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 75% | ETA: 1s
#> $`Marcus Rashford`
#> [1] "/en/players/a1d5bd30/Marcus-Rashford"
#> 
#> $`Erling Haaland`
#> [1] "/en/players/1f44ac21/Erling-Braut-Haland"
#> 
#> $Marcus
#> NULL
#> 
#> $`Super Mario`
#> NULL

^{Created on 2023-07-27 with reprex v2.0.2}