Sportmonks Blogs

Before you build with a football API, you need to know whether it provides the data your project requires. Coverage Finder helps you check Sportmonks’ football coverage by league and individual data field. You can search for a league, explore coverage on a globe, describe your requirements in plain English and compare leagues against the data you need. You can also export coverage as CSV and inspect a data example from a league’s latest played fixture. This tutorial shows you how to get started.

Europe’s top five leagues and the Eredivisie have all stopped for the October international break somewhere between four and seven rounds into the 2026/27 season, which is enough football for the early tables to say something real and too little for any of it to be settled. Manchester City have won all five of their Premier League games under Enzo Maresca, Barcelona have won all seven of their La Liga games, Borussia Dortmund have taken the full twelve points from four Bundesliga matches, Monaco lead Ligue 1 without having lost, Roma, Inter and Lazio are level on 13 points at the top of Serie A, and AZ lead the Eredivisie for the first time after seven rounds since 2011/12.

The Ballon d’Or 2026 ceremony takes place on Monday 26 October at the London Palladium Theatre, the first time the event has been held outside Paris, and it starts at 8 p.m. UK time. It is the 70th edition of the award, and London was chosen to honour the first winner, England’s Stanley Matthews, in 1956. The night will crown the men’s winner as the 70th champion and the women’s winner as the eighth recipient, and it also presents the Kopa, Yashin, Gerd Müller and Sócrates awards, the coach awards and the club awards, according to UEFA. This guide lists every award, who is nominated, how the winners are chosen and where to watch, and it links to our detailed nominee rankings for each category. The awards have been co-organised by France Football and UEFA since 2024.

The 2026 Ballon d’Or will be presented at the London Palladium on 26 October, and the 30 men on the shortlist are judged on a season that ran from 3 August 2025 to the World Cup final on 19 July 2026. Harry Kane arrives with 73 goals for club and country, Lamine Yamal with a World Cup and a La Liga title, Kylian Mbappé with a Champions League scoring record and a second World Cup Golden Boot, and Rodri with the Golden Ball from Spain’s title run, while Paris Saint-Germain supply ten nominees after retaining the Champions League. Below, we rank all 30 nominees by the strength of their case, and each player gets a strongest case, a weakest case and a verdict. The order is our own editorial view of how well each season fits the criteria France Football publishes, which place individual performance first, team achievements second and class and fair play third, and it is a judgement about the cases rather than a forecast of the jury, whose result arrives on 26 October. Season totals for the same player differ between outlets because some count club matches only, others add international games, and the eligibility window cuts across two campaigns. Where two figures conflict, we use the one attached to a named competition, so a Bundesliga number is a Bundesliga number and a club-and-country number is labelled as such.

The Ballon d’Or 2026 coach and club awards each have five nominees in the men’s and women’s categories, 20 in total, and the winners will be announced at the London Palladium on 26 October. Luis Enrique and Paris Saint-Germain won the men’s coach and club awards last year, Sarina Wiegman and Arsenal won the women’s, and this year’s men’s coach list is made up of four Spaniards and one Belgian, with Mikel Arteta’s first Premier League title putting him in contention with the defending winner. Below, we rank all 20 nominees by the strength of their case, and each coach or club gets a strongest case, a weakest case and a verdict. The order is our own editorial view rather than a forecast of the jury, and the four categories are ranked separately. Coaches and clubs are judged on the same 2025-26 season, so we cover them together, because the stories overlap heavily.

The Women’s Ballon d’Or 2026 will be presented at the London Palladium on 26 October, and the shortlist does not include Aitana Bonmatí, who won the last three editions but fractured her fibula in November and returned only in May. Barcelona still supply eight of the 30 nominees after winning the Women’s Champions League, Liga F, the Copa de la Reina and the Supercopa, and Barcelona players have won each of the last five awards, Alexia Putellas in 2021 and 2022 and Bonmatí from 2023 to 2025. Below, we rank all 30 nominees by the strength of their case, and each player gets a strongest case, a weakest case and a verdict. The order is our own editorial view of how well each season fits the criteria France Football publishes, which place individual performance first, team achievements second and class and fair play third, and it is a judgement about the cases rather than a forecast of the jury. The women’s jury draws one journalist from each of the top 50 nations in the women’s FIFA ranking, according to ESPN, and the result is confirmed at the ceremony. This was not a World Cup year in women’s football, so club form carries more weight than usual. The Women’s Asian Cup, played in March and won by Japan, counts towards the award, while the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations does not, and the 30 nominees come from 18 nationalities. Season totals for the same player differ between outlets because some count club matches only and others add international games, so where two figures conflict we use the one attached to a named competition.

The Yashin Trophy, named after Lev Yashin, the only goalkeeper to win the Ballon d’Or, has 10 men and five women on its 2026 shortlists, and the winners will be announced at the London Palladium on 26 October. The men’s list has no obvious frontrunner, because the 2025 winner Gianluigi Donnarumma was not nominated and the field mixes a World Cup winner, a Premier League champion, the Champions League holder and a 40-year-old whose seven saves against Spain became one of the tournament’s defining moments. Three of the 10 men are African, a record for the category since the men’s trophy was created in 2019. Below, we rank all 15 nominees by the strength of their case, and each goalkeeper gets a strongest case, a weakest case and a verdict. The order is our own editorial view rather than a forecast of the jury, and the men’s and women’s awards are ranked separately. The men’s window includes the World Cup, so summer performances count alongside club form.

The Kopa Trophy, awarded at the Ballon d’Or ceremony to the best young player in world football, has 10 men and five women on its 2026 shortlists, and the winners will be announced at the London Palladium on 26 October. Lamine Yamal has won the men’s award in each of the last two years, first at the age of 17 years and three months, while Barcelona’s Vicky López won the first women’s trophy in 2025, and both are nominated again alongside a men’s list in which 60 per cent of the names are new. Below, we rank all 15 nominees by the strength of their case, and each player gets a strongest case, a weakest case and a verdict. The order is our own editorial view rather than a forecast of the jury, and the men’s and women’s awards are ranked separately. The trophy covers the 2025-26 season, and the men’s window includes the World Cup, so summer performances count alongside club form.

Sports betting margin, also called overround or vig, is the amount by which the implied probabilities in a betting market add up to more than 100%. The size of that margin can differ between competitions, bookmakers, markets and points in time. Highly traded football leagues tend to attract more pricing competition and deeper information, while less liquid competitions can carry more uncertainty. For betting-platform developers, the important point is not to assume one fixed margin across every league or market. Margin should be calculated from the actual odds returned for each bookmaker, fixture and market before those prices are converted into probabilities or compared across competitions.

Football match event data records the significant incidents that shape a match, such as goals, cards, substitutions, penalties and VAR decisions, together with information about when they happened and which players or teams were involved. In our Football API, these events can be attached directly to a fixture and ordered chronologically using sort_order. They are different from match statistics such as total passes, tackles or possession, and different again from player-tracking data. Understanding those boundaries is essential when building live match centres, timelines, automated reports or analytical products because each data type answers a different question.

A season preview portal gives readers one place to understand what is coming next: participating teams, squads, opening fixtures, league structure and useful context from previous seasons. Building all of that manually becomes difficult as soon as you cover more than one competition. With a structured football data source, most of the repetitive work can be automated while your editorial team focuses on the analysis readers actually care about. This guide lays out a realistic seven-day build using our Football API, from identifying the correct season and teams to generating team pages, fixture calendars and an update process that keeps the portal useful after the opening weekend.

An FPL-style game needs two distinct data layers. The first is the football layer: players, squads, fixtures, match states, lineups, events and player statistics. Our Football API can supply those facts. The second is the fantasy layer: player prices, ownership, transfers, gameweek assignments, squad rules, captaincy, bonus-point logic and your scoring system. Those mechanics belong to your application. Keeping the two layers separate is one of the most important architectural decisions in a fantasy build, because real-world football data can change without rewriting historical fantasy state, while your game rules can evolve without changing the underlying fixture records.