Home Football APIs: How to select the right football data provider [2024]

Football APIs: How to select the right football data provider [2024]

In 2024, the world of Football APIs will thrive as the demand for accurate football data continues to rise. Whether crafting a football app, analysing trends, or engaging fans, choosing the right football data provider is crucial. This guide will navigate you through critical considerations for selecting the perfect Football API provider in 2024. From data quality to reliability and pricing, we’ll help you make an informed decision for your project’s success. Let’s explore how to unlock the full potential of your football-related endeavours.

Football

Time to read< 1 min

Published 18 November 2020

Last updated 12 March 2024

Football APIs: How to select the right football data provider [2024]

How do you select a Football Data Provider [2024]?

Selecting the perfect Football API for your sports business, fantasy game, predictive betting website, or hobby project can be daunting. Football data has many features, such as live scores, fixtures, statistics, standings, odds, and much more.

So, how do you find that one perfect Football API that is perfect for your project? I personally experienced the hardships of selecting a good Football API back in 2016, and in this blog, I will share my thoughts and some tips about how you can find a great data provider, as well as common API shortcomings.

Now you might wonder: if the Football data provider I chose was bad, can’t I switch to a better one?

Yes, you certainly can, but it will cost you many resources and headaches. Your entire project will be built upon the data from your provider. Changing that will require a tremendous amount of work. That’s why it’s best to immediately find one data provider that perfectly suits your wishes and needs.

You are here to find out which Football API or Football Data Provider will be right for you. I must mention that Sportmonks offers a highly flexible Football API with all kinds of add-ons. Also, we have over 30,000 active users. Now, let’s look at how to find out which API will be best suited for you.

Don’t worry. I’m here to help you. Let’s start with the common shortcomings of a Football API Provider.

Common API issues

Most people think that if they can save on costs, their profits will be higher. As such, they tend to go for free API data providers. This is a very common pitfall.
‘You get what you pay for’. – This is a ubiquitous phrase.

Well, in this case, you pay nothing, and as expected, you get utter rubbish. Low-quality data is especially harmful to your business. You might be saving up on costs associated with a subscription, but displaying faulty data to your customers is a death sentence for any aspiring football/sports application. How can customers trust your business if your data isn’t even trustworthy? You are ambitious, and you would want to pay for your data, which brings us to the second issue.

They are too expensive! Data providers who have earned a reputation for actually being reliable and accurate tend to charge ridiculous prices for their services. Yes, they provide the data you need, but can your start-up business afford to pay their premium prices? Probably not, right?

When we started Sportmonks, it was pretty hard to find a Football API data provider that wasn’t robbing me in daylight or simply offering free but terrible data. But now, eight years after I started Sportmonks, there are quite a few decent to excellent middle-segmented Football API data providers out there.

Well, how do you make a selection, then? Here are five essential characteristics of any API provider that you should consider.

Five essential characteristics of a football data provider

Data quality

Well, if you’re going to pay for your data, it might as well be of high quality, don’t you think? What constitutes high-quality data? High-quality data is accurate, complete, fast, and updated regularly. Did I mention accurate? Accurate data is incredibly important. It doesn’t matter how fast and up-to-date the data is. If it’s not accurate, it’s not worth your time.

Many companies claim to have ‘the most accurate data’ or the ‘highest quality data,’ but you should never blindly trust these statements. Investigate properly before committing! For example, test the data with a free plan or trial.

Data coverage

Things, people, and businesses all grow. The more your business or project grows, the more leagues you can afford to show unless your data provider bottlenecks you by having a limited number of leagues they cover.

Determine what leagues you want to show, but consider what leagues you might want to show in the future. For instance, at Sportmonks, you will always be future-proof because we currently offer over 2300 football leagues worldwide, and we still seek to expand the number of leagues we cover.

Speed of livescores and match events

Tracking live football games is quite popular. Knowing what minute the game is in, when someone scored, received a yellow card, or got substituted are all elements of a livescore endpoint. Being able to track an ongoing game in real time is quite important. Even more important is the speed at which this happens. Remember that accuracy should always be the priority, though. Fast livescores is common jargon because people want to show in-game events as soon as they happen.

The only way they can be shown in real time is by having fast livescores that are updated frequently. You don’t want a Football API that updates every 45 seconds. No, you want it updated every 30 seconds, 15 seconds, or even faster.

API flexibility

Integrating your data provider’s Football API into your project can be a hassle, especially if their API is static. A static API gives you no options to remove or add parameters, resulting in you getting various responses loaded with data you won’t be using anyway. In other words, it’s useless data that you must throw out, which costs time.

While flexible APIs allow you to customize the responses you get from the API fully. With flexible APIs, you only request the data that you need. This saves a lot of time integrating the data into your system.

Support

Unless you’re a prodigy or a veteran (and even then), you will most likely need assistance from your football data provider to get started with their Football API. How fast do they respond to emails? Is their API well-documented? Can you test their API via a trial, free plan, or documentation?

Proper customer support is vital for your business’ success. It doesn’t matter if the API is brilliant. If it’s terribly difficult to use, you won’t be able to get the maximum value out of it.

There are more things to remember, but now you have a basic idea of what to look out for with these five characteristics.

Next, I will explain why Sportmonks could be the perfect data provider for your business or hobby project!

Sportmonks’ Football API: How does it work?

Although I could gush about how awesome our Sportmonks APIs are, that would be boring and not worth your or my time. Instead, let me give you a demonstration of one of our prized endpoints: the livescore endpoint.

I will show you:
1) What’s included in the livescore endpoint
2) How you can make API requests to the livescore endpoint
3) How you can take advantage of Sportmonks’ API flexibility

Fast livescores

Our livescore endpoint allows you to obtain live data feeds for football matches of the current day. The endpoint covers real-time data and match events such as goals, cards, and substitutions. But that’s not all! Because our APIs are incredibly flexible, you can also request more data shown to you within this livescore endpoint request. This allows you to include data like line-ups, statistics, comments, odds, participants, and much more.

Note that matches in the GET All Livescore endpoint will appear 15 minutes before the match starts and disappear 15 minutes after the match has ended.

Remember how I mentioned you want the fastest livescores possible for your business ss or hobby project? We at Sportmonks can offer you lightning-fast livescores compared to our competitors.

Please don’t take my word for it; instead, see for yourself by using our free trial or testing our free plan. Register in MySportmonks and start testing if we keep our promises.

Moreover, we cover over 2,300+ leagues. So, you can request livescores for an insane number of leagues worldwide!

Making an API request

Another one of our selling points is ease of use. Requesting fixtures, statistics, livescores, teams, seasons, and other information will always be easy.

You’ll first need a Sportmonks API token, which you can acquire by creating a Mysportmonks account.

Making requests is simple. Add your API token as a parameter to your request:

https://api.sportmonks.com/v3/football/livescores?api_token=YOUR_TOKEN

This request will only return data if current-day matches are ongoing and covered by your plan.

Are you interested in more information on how to build your own livescore app? Check out our how-to guide!

How to build a livescore website

Sportmonks’s API flexibility

I briefly mentioned how our APIs are incredibly flexible. Time to get more in-depth. With Sportmonks’ APIs, you can fully customise and decide what data you want to receive by adding parameters to your requests.

Every endpoint has a set of parameters or, as we like to call them, includes. For example, the livescore endpoint has the following includes available:

sport round stage group aggregate league seasoncoaches tvStations venue state weatherReport lineups events timeline comments trends statistics periods participants odds premiumOdds inplayOdds prematchNews metadata sidelinedpredictions referees formations ballCoordinates scores

For example, we can add team information to our request by extending the request with '&include=participants'

https://api.sportmonks.com/v3/football/livescores?api_token=YOURTOKEN&include=participants

Want events and lineups, too? No problem!

https://api.sportmonks.com/v3/football/livescores?api_token=YOURTOKEN&include=participants;events;lineups

Nested includes

We can go even further beyond simple includes. Nested includes allows you to request relations on relations, which means you can combine things. It sounds confusing, but don’t worry! We’ll show you how it can be done.

For example, we want to request events of a match, but we want more information about the players who are linked to these events. So, we want to know more about player X, who scored a goal, or player Y, who got a red card. We want to know his nationality and first and last name, but such information is not included in the standard events.

That’s why we create a nested include with '.player'

https://api.sportmonks.com/v3/football/livescores?api_token=YOURTOKEN&include=participants;events.player;lineups

But, wait, you can do more! You can add another include, or select the fields you’re interested in. Check out our includes tutorial and filter & selecting tutorial.

Sportmonks subscriptions

Now that you know how great our product is, it is time to convince you to subscribe to one of our plans! Money is an important factor when it comes to selecting an Football API provider. Getting good quality data for an affordable price in 2016 was incredibly difficult.

Luckily, I went through those hardships for you and founded Sportmonks. At Sportmonks, we can proudly offer you an amazing, highly flexible, and fast Football API product for a fair price.

We believe that customers should be able to test our APIs in depth before committing to a subscription. That’s why we created the free plan. This plan allows users to thoroughly test our API’s many features at no cost for two domestic football leagues: the Scottish Premiership and the Danish Superliga.

If you like what you see, you can upgrade to our advanced data plans. Have a look for yourself.

Free Plan

Our Free Plan comes with the two domestic football leagues: the Scottish Premiership and the Danish Superliga. This Free Plan gives you access to 180 API calls per minute per endpoint and comes with all of our standard data features. It will allow you to test most of our API’s functionalities at zero cost. This free plan will stay free forever, so take however long you need to make sure our API is the API.

Paid plans

We are confident that you’ll like what you see in our Free Plan. Afterwards, you can upgrade to one of our paid plans. At the time of writing, we offer over 2,300+ leagues worldwide, allowing you to customize which data features you would like and offer extra API calls and webhooks.

We currently offer three standardized plans

European plan

Starting at a price of €29,- per month, the Euro Plan offers both monthly and yearly pricing. The plan includes 2000 API requests per hour/endpoint for over …+ leagues.

Worldwide plan

Starting at a price of €99,- per month the Worldwide Plan offers monthly and yearly pricing. The plan includes 2000 API requests per hour/endpoint for over 100+ leagues.

The Enterprise Plan

This is the plan for the true entrepreneur. Our Enterprise Plan covers everything you need to make your business idea a success. Contact our sales team to get a rundown of the pricing and what’s included in this plan.

Data Features

All three paid plans have basic, standard, or advanced data features. This means that there are nine plans in total. Click on our coverage page for an overview of all our data feature sets.

Custom Plan

Last but not least, we offer the possibility of creating your own custom plan. With this, you can choose only a few domestic leagues, like the English Premier League and Bundesliga. You can also fully customize which data features you would like to have included. Anything is possible! Contact our sales team, and they will gladly help you out!

Extra API Features

You have the possibility to expand your application by using the Live Score Widget, Prediction API and News API.

Wrapping it up

This was quite a lengthy blog, but I hope you have gotten a little wiser. Working with fantasy games, betting websites, and whatnot requires precise, accurate, and fast sports data, which can be hard to find. Still not sure which football data provider to choose? Contact us via our contact page or send an email to support@sportmonks.com.

I created Sportmonks to provide people with high-quality data for an affordable price. Since then, Sportmonks has over 900 paying customers and 30000 accounts worldwide. Who knows, perhaps we might become your data provider.

Written by Jurgen Kolkman

Jurgen Kolkman is the CEO and Founder of Sportmonks. For over 15 years, he has been active in the sports data and IT business industries. His deep involvement in the industry's evolution and hands-on experience in building a successful company testify to his expertise and authority. Jurgen is passionate about sports data and actively contributes to the community by sharing insights, engaging in discussions, and writing about Sportmonks' journey in this fascinating industry.

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