Football-Data.org API
Freemium REST API providing football/soccer data for major European leagues including standings, fixtures, results, and team statistics.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
TLS enforced. Single API token with no scope granularity — one key grants all-or-nothing access to your tier. Token revocation available through dashboard.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
Building agents or apps focused on European football leagues that need a reliable, simple REST API with a usable free tier for prototyping and light production use.
Avoid When
You need coverage beyond top European leagues, real-time push data, or odds and betting markets.
Use Cases
- • Fetching live and historical match results for European football leagues
- • Building football standings tables and fixture calendars
- • Querying team and player statistics for analysis or content generation
- • Monitoring league competition progress for fantasy football agents
- • Powering soccer-focused chatbots and automated reporting
Not For
- • American sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) — football/soccer only
- • Real-time sub-second live data — free tier polling has rate limits
- • Leagues outside the supported European competition list without a paid plan
Interface
Authentication
API token passed in X-Auth-Token request header. Single token grants access to all endpoints permitted by your tier. Self-service signup with immediate token issuance.
Pricing
Free tier is genuinely useful for hobbyists and light agents. Paid tiers unlock La Liga detail, all UEFA competitions, and higher throughput.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Free tier 10 req/min limit is easy to hit if an agent fans out parallel queries
- ⚠ Competition IDs are numeric and must be known in advance — no slug-based lookup
- ⚠ Data update frequency varies by competition tier; some lower-tier leagues update slowly
- ⚠ No official SDK means agents must handle HTTP client retry logic themselves
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
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Package Brief
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Score Monitoring
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Continuous monitoring
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-07.