Is there a free football API?
Are you looking for a football API to display real time statistics to your audiences? If you are, you are in the right place. In this article, we will talk about a football API that will allow you to generate all the real time stats of all the teams of various competitions. But before we begin, here are some of the basics that you would want to know before integrating a football API on your website.
What is a Football API?
Football API is a dedicated Application Programmed Interface (API) developed for fetching the data of football matches and display them to the audiences. The data can be anything such as live scores, line up, results, minute by minute game update and many more.
What is the Use of Football API for a Website?
Football API has different uses for different types of websites ranging from keeping the audience updated to boosting the engagement rate of a website.
For example:
An official website of a Football club uses an API to display the results, player’s stats, upcoming matches, etc. of the club. Their main objective is to keep their supporters who visits the website updated about everything that is going around the club.
Likewise, a live score website will use the Football API to display the real time minute by minute updates to the audiences (football supporters who are unable to watch live matches). Besides, these types of websites will also have a database where all the results, upcoming matches and head to head analyses of different football clubs playing various competitions as well as player stats are stored.
Similarly, using a football API to display the live score and other stats in a football blog website can play a good role to make your site more engaging and keep your organically generated traffic for a longer time.
Can You Use Football API to Make Your Website Commercial?
Above we have discussed about Football API help to boost the user engagement of a website. Here, we will talk about how it can be used on a website for commercial purposes.
If you are planning to become a bookmaker and looking to run an online betting site then, integrating a reliable Football API is the first thing that you need to do once you have competed building your Football site.
You will be able to add stats (live score, minutes by minutes update, head-to-head stats, etc.) on your website. Using those stats, a bookmaker will be able to place different types of betting odds to enable the bettors place their wager on the website.
Another type of commercial website that can be powered by a football API is a Fantasy Soccer website. Here, the API will fetch the player stats and provide different points to the players according to the contributions that they have made (goal score, provide assist or kept clean sheet) on the football match.
Different Types of Football API
Now that we have discussed about what a football API is and what is its uses on the website (commercial and non-commercial), let’s discuss its different types.
Like for example:
You can find a dedicated English Premier League (EPL) API that will provider all the stats and results for the clubs and players that are participating in the English Premier League.
Similarly, for FIFA World Cup, there is a separate World Cup API that will display the stats and results of the country and players that are participating in the World Cup tournament.
Apart from that, there are also some special API that provide the stats of all the clubs and players for the competitions that are running around the world. These types of Football API are mostly used by the large-scale company that are running a huge betting center or a live score site.
Is there a Free Football API?
Yes, there are many free football API that can be found in the web. You can simply integrate the API on your website and check whether it is suitable or not as you won’t have to pay any penny as you will be using it for free.
Is using a Free Football API Good?
If you are running a small-scale business or a football blogging website, then using a free football API might be just good enough.
However, if you are planning to run a bigger website with large scale commercialization then the features and stats available in the free API might be limited compared to your needs. Apart from that, the free API may not be well documented or supported.
So, if you are planning big then, we recommend you to use a paid one that will provide all the required advanced features to display the stats and score line to the audiences.
How to Pick a Paid Football API?
Most of the paid football API will provide a trial period for a certain number of days or limited to a couple of competitions. You can fully utilise these days to test these APIs by integrating them to your local or live site and once you have found the suitable one, you can purchase the full license.
The Bottom Line
So, we have discussed what a football API actually is and its use case (both commercially and non-commercially). Then, we talked about different types of API that are available to provide the stats of dedicated competitions or the whole world. After that, we discussed the availability of the free API, their advantages/disadvantages and the solution to pick and test.
So, if looking to pick and test a paid football API, feel free to sign up. We will provide you a 14 days trial period and, on those days, you will be able to test almost all the features available on the API. While using the API, if you need any help, you can refer to the documentation, tutorials or ask a question our support team.