Case study
Sofifa
This Case study is written by the owner of SoFIFA, an individual developer who is helping FIFA career mode players build the strongest team.
SoFIFAThis Case study is written by the owner of SoFIFA, an individual developer who is helping FIFA career mode players build the strongest team.
SoFIFAHey, I’m Khachin, an individual developer and the founder of SoFIFA. SoFIFA is a project that started while I played a video game called FIFA 07. When I played the FIFA career mode, I found that I was constantly wasting a lot of time finding good, cheap, or young, talented players, so I started to build this web project to help filter players by my needs. Over the past 16 years, we have added more and more features to adjust to the game’s new release.
When you start to play FIFA career mode, SoFIFA is the site you can never miss.
We are building a platform to help people playing the FIFA/FC series’ career mode and share their opinions or creative ideas. SoFIFA lets people search for almost every single attribute in the game, saving time and levelling up the gaming experience. SoFIFA is the first and most creative online FIFA/FC series career mode database.
We can link the in-game and real-world data to build a reliable data source for gamers and modders, and then we can rate a team/player even if they never appear in the game.
When we collected the game data, we found that the information from the game was not always correct. Sometimes, they misspelt the player’s name or gave them the wrong date of birth or nationality. The most terrible thing is we need a reliable data source to check whether the data is correct when they put players on the wrong team. In the past, we checked this info by hand, which required much work and time.
Now, with the data provider, we can easily find the players and teams and their relations.
We like Sportmonks has a low price and ample data coverage at the same time and has a high update frequency. You have covered over 2000 football leagues and added or updated teams/players daily, and the data has a clear structure and relations.
We appreciate that when the game adds young players who rarely appear in public view, we can find their statistics from Sportmonks API in a few days.
We are focusing on historical data more than live data. So we request data like countries, leagues, standings, statistics, teams, players, coaches, venues, transfers, sidelined and trophies, etc.
I don’t know how many people are in your customer support team. It’s not always the same person replying to me, but the conversation is fluent and efficient. You are doing well.
It’s straightforward to integrate with Sportmonks’ API, there are plenty of examples and tutorials, and the documentation is very detailed. There is detailed Postman documentation with examples, which is easy to understand and speeds up the development.
The hardest part is the rate limit (3,000 API calls per hour per entity). Sometimes, I have to wait 3 or 4 days to get historical data for all players.
Numerous data providers exist in the market. However, we require reliable data with extensive historical coverage, encompassing a broader range of competitions, not limited to just the top 5 leagues like the Premier League, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, La Liga, Serie A, etc.
I contacted OPTA, the most authoritative and professional data provider. Their data coverage spans almost every football competition, providing years of historical data. Naturally, their pricing is considerably high, as expected.
Another option is Data Sports Group from Germany, offering meticulous historical data, including league and team names across different periods. Unfortunately, the price exceeds €1,500 EUR per month, which surpassed my budget constraints. After that, I found a provider called API-Football, which doesn’t have a lot of data coverage but has a reasonable price and flexible API.
Two years ago, I discovered Sportmonks on Google search. Sportmonks covered 1800+ leagues (over 2200 right now) and had a reasonable price at that time. Following a one-month trial, I opted for Sportmonks due to their extensive coverage and moderate pricing.
The API 2.0 version of Sportmonks is almost the same as those of the other providers. After being updated to version 3.0 the data relation is more clear. Version 3.0 includes some additional information such as detailed positions for players, which is good.
You can find more information about Sportmonks by contacting our support team. In the meantime, you can investigate our API for free by registering to My.Sportmonks and trying the Scottish Premiership and the Danish Superliga data with our free plan. Our free plan is free and accessible forever! Testing one of our default or custom plans with our 14-day free trial is also possible.