Building a Wrestling Title History API with Laravel

Ish D — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:33:51 +0000

I recently launched PopDropkick.dev, a REST API for professional wrestling data — specifically focused on tracking wrestlers, promotions, championships, and detailed title reigns.

It started as a fun Laravel side project to explore API design and relationship modeling, but it’s grown into something more structured and (hopefully) useful to others.

The API handles:

Wrestler profiles (with slugs, aliases, and debut dates)
Promotions and cross-promotion affiliations
Championship title reigns — including vacated titles and multi-reign tracking

I’ve populated it with a full history of the NXT Championship for now, and it’s ready for expansion into more titles and promotions (AEW, WWE, NJPW, etc.).

🔗 Links

Live API

GitHub Repo

Why I Built This

We consume and test with a lot of APIs at place my work but that data is never fun. Most wrestling stat sources are either static HTML, heavily scraped, or organized in a way that isn't developer-friendly. I wanted something:

JSON-first
RESTful and linkable
Easy to query for reign history, current champions and something highly flexible

Each Title Reign ties to a Wrestler and a Championship, and includes:

won_on, lost_on

won_at, lost_at (events or shows)

reign_number

vacated logic

Human-readable reign length (like 6mos and 3w) is generated automatically based on date intervals.

Example: Tommaso Ciampa

Calling this endpoint:

GET /api/wrestlers/tommaso-ciampa

Returns:

{
  "data": {
    "id": "f05533f7-0ef1-4b65-b130-b12504f08852",
    "slug": "tommaso-ciampa",
    "ring_name": "Tommaso Ciampa",
    "real_name": "Tommaso Whitney",
    "also_known_as": [],
    "active_title_reigns": [],
    "promotions": [
      {
        "id": "5095d51e-adee-4173-824f-ecdad2b755ee",
        "name": "NXT",
        "slug": "nxt",
        "detail_url": "https://popdropkick.dev/api/promotions/nxt",
        "abbreviation": "NXT"
      }
    ],
    "active_promotions": [
      {
        "id": "5095d51e-adee-4173-824f-ecdad2b755ee",
        "name": "NXT",
        "slug": "nxt",
        "detail_url": "https://popdropkick.dev/api/promotions/nxt",
        "abbreviation": "NXT"
      }
    ],
    "debut_date": "2005-01-01",
    "title_reigns": [
      {
        "championship_id": "395280ec-7cf0-42c7-ad50-b8da0c3ba6ba",
        "championship_name": "NXT Championship",
        "won_on": "2021-09-14",
        "won_at": "NXT 2.0 (premiere)",
        "lost_on": "2022-01-04",
        "lost_at": "NXT New Year's Evil 2022",
        "reign_number": 1,
        "win_type": null,
        "reign_length": 112,
        "reign_length_human": "3mos and 3w"
      },
      {
        "championship_id": "395280ec-7cf0-42c7-ad50-b8da0c3ba6ba",
        "championship_name": "NXT Championship",
        "won_on": "2018-07-25",
        "won_at": "NXT (TV)",
        "lost_on": "2019-02-20",
        "lost_at": "vacated",
        "reign_number": 1,
        "win_type": null,
        "reign_length": 210,
        "reign_length_human": "6mos and 3w"
      }
    ],
    "created_at": "2025-07-10T14:59:36+00:00",
    "updated_at": "2025-07-10T14:59:36+00:00"
  },
  "meta": {
    "status": 200,
    "counts": {
      "title_reigns": 2,
      "active_title_reigns": 0,
      "promotions": 1,
      "active_promotions": 1
    },
    "timestamps": {
      "timestamp": "2025-07-10T16:01:03+00:00",
      "response_time_ms": 61.45
    }
  },
  "message": null
}

What's Next

Add more championships and wrestlers (want to help?)
Handle tag team title reigns (with multiple wrestlers per reign)
Add pagination and filtering for title reigns
More metadata: Longest/Shortest reign, Most reigns, Total Championships Held, ~~Days as Champion~~ <-- done
Open up POST/PATCH endpoints for contributors

Want to Try It?

You can hit the live API at https://popdropkick.dev, or check out the source code on GitHub:

https://github.com/outofjam/popdropkickv1

The auto generated docs are at https://popdropkick.dev/docs/api

If you want to mess with protected routes (POST, PATCH), ping me and I’ll send over an API token.

Thanks for reading! Feedback is more than welcome.

DEV Community: Ish D

Building a Wrestling Title History API with Laravel