I recently launched Kickoff Data, a REST API for football match data.
Who it’s for
Developers building livescore widgets, tipster blogs, bots, and small football apps.
What the API returns
- Live and finished matches
- Fixtures and standings
- Lineups and in-play stats
- Historic seasons
- Match odds (on higher plans)
What I learned shipping this
- Coverage questions beat feature lists. People ask “is league X included?” before anything else.
- Live data is really about polling, rate limits, and failure modes — not magic “real-time.”
- Docs matter more than landing-page adjectives. Time-to-first-successful-request is the conversion metric.
Links
Site: https://www.kickoffdata.com
Docs: https://www.kickoffdata.com/docs
If you’ve integrated a sports data API before, I’d love to hear what made you choose (or leave) a provider.
Top comments (1)
The polling/failure-mode distinction is useful. One docs example I'd want is a widget handling a successful response that is stale, not just a timeout or 429. Do responses expose when the match data was last updated, and how should a client distinguish "no change" from a delayed upstream feed? A sample that keeps the last score but visibly marks its age would make the reliability contract much clearer. I haven't integrated a sports API, so this is a docs question rather than a provider comparison.