This case study is written about Footi. We spoke to Tim, The director of Little Thunder and Footi. The latter is a football website that covers the Premier League, Champions League, and more.
Go to Footi
“Hey, I’m Tim, Director of Little Thunder, a Digital Design Studio based in Northern Ireland. We create digital products and solutions for SMEs, and Footi is one of our internal projects. Footi was born out of a side project of mine during the 1st lockdown in 2020. I’m a big football fan and lifelong Manchester United supporter, so I worked up a quick website that housed the fixtures, results and news for United fans called ‘Daily Reds’, using free APIs, which eventually gave me the idea for Footi.”
“Even though our company operates in the digital space, our work can still have an environmental impact by consuming electricity and generating carbon emissions. With Footi, we explored how we can create a complex and dynamic, environmentally conscious and sustainable website.
On the face of it, Footi looks like another football website but underneath is where it is uniquely different. It’s built using serverless technologies, meaning it’s faster, more accessible and has a much lower carbon footprint than other football websites. In fact, it produces 8 – 10 times less CO2 than the official Premier League website.”
“The first issue we encountered was the quality and timeliness of data. For Daily Reds, I used a number of free APIs and the old saying “You get what you pay for” rang true. The feeds were limited, the quality of the data was poor (fixtures outdated as an example), and it could sometimes take a day or more before fixtures, results, tables etc., were updated. When Footi eventually moved from a side project for one football team into a fully-fledged Premier League website covering 20 teams, it was clear we needed to up our game regarding data quality, which led us to Sportmonks.”
“We researched various options for an API provider. A big draw for us to Sportmonks was the free trial that enabled us to get hands-on with it, and once we plugged it into our serverless framework, we were sold on it. Sportmonks documentation is also excellent.
The data is timely, the live feeds are excellent, everything is kept up-to-date, and the quantity of statistics on offer is incredible. The ability to use ‘includes’ to enrich requests is also next level. It allows us to tailor the data we need, reducing server roundtrips and improving our goal of providing a carbon-conscious football website.
“The support team is really responsive and has helped us with any questions or issues we’ve had. It’s great to see the new data and features that have been added to the API over the past few years, and we look forward to upgrading Footi to the new Sportmonks V3 API over the summer.”
“Yes! What started as a hobby side project has evolved into a fully-fledged football site that we take a lot of pride in. As a digital design studio, Footi has been a great showcase for us to promote our team skills and commitment to the environment.”
With Sportmonks, there are a lot of different statistics you can use. If we take a look at Footi, they have made it possible to show the teams, the standings, the schedule and the head-to-head statistics. Footi also showcases in-depth statistics for every match. It will show a lot of different statistics, for example, passes made by a team, shots on target per team, complete match squads and lineups or how many shots were taken from outside the box.
“We wanted to offer a rich, in-depth view of games via our match reports and match previews, and Sportmonks have helped us achieve this.”
You can find more information about Sportmonks by getting in contact with our support team. In the meantime, you can investigate our API for free by registering to My.Sportmonks and try the Scottish Premiership and the Danish Superliga data with our free plan. Our free plan is free and accessible forever! It is also possible to test one of our default or custom plans with our 14-day free trial.