A Survey of Public APIs for Building a Football Live Score Site in 2026 — Part 2: Weather API Review

Weather is useful on a football live score site only when it answers a specific question: what conditions are expected at the venue around kickoff?

A generic city forecast is not enough. A useful match card needs the venue coordinates, the kickoff time, an hourly forecast, a clear update time, and a graceful fallback when the forecast is unavailable.

This is Part 2 of a survey of the public APIs needed to build a football live score site in 2026:

1. News APIs
2. Weather APIs for match-day context
3. Football data APIs

Series scope and ground rules

The following rules apply to every article in this series:

1. Candidate source: Every API considered comes from the public-apis repository on GitHub. I chose it because it has more than 400,000 GitHub stars and offers a broad, well-organized set of categories and API options.
2. Review order: APIs are considered in the same order in which they appear in the repository. The order is not a ranking, and providers have not paid for placement.
3. Shortlisting: Every entry in the relevant category is screened, but only APIs that plausibly fit a football live score site receive a detailed review.
4. No implied endorsement: Inclusion in public-apis supplies the candidate pool; it does not mean that the repository or this series recommends an API.
5. Type of review: This is a product-fit and documentation review, not a performance or forecast-accuracy benchmark. Provider claims are identified as documented capabilities rather than independent test results.
6. Snapshot date: Documentation, pricing, and public usage terms were checked on September 9, 2026. They may change, so the linked official pages remain the final source of truth.
7. Meaning of football: In this series, “football” means association football, also called soccer, unless stated otherwise.

For Part 2, I screened all 39 enties in the repository's Weather section. The detailed shortlist contains eight global, general-purpose services that can plausibly provide current conditions or an hourly forecast for a match venue.

What a football weather card actually needs

The core input should be a stadium's latitude and longitude, not just a club or city name. Clubs can move matches, share stadiums, play at neutral venues, or use grounds far from a city centre.

For each fixture, the useful fields are small:

• Hourly temperature and apparent temperature
• Precipitation probability and expected precipitation
• Wind speed, direction, and gusts
• Humidity and a compact weather condition code
• Forecast issue or update time
• The provider's required attribution
• A reliable mapping between kickoff time and the venue's local time

Minute-by-minute rain, air quality, pollen, marine conditions, and a 15-day outlook may be valuable in other products, but they are not the first requirements for a score site.

The forecast horizon also changes the product. A three-day forecast covers most match-centre traffic close to kickoff. A seven- or fifteen-day forecast is more useful for fixture pages, but should be labelled as less certain when the match is still far away.

Shortlist at a glance

API	Free allowance	Relevant free coverage	Commercial use on free access	Initial fit for a football site
Weatherstack	100 calls/month	Current conditions only	Not presented as a commercial plan	Easy evaluation, but no free forecast
AccuWeather	14-day trial, 500 calls/day	Current, 12-hour and 5-day forecasts	No; low tiers are trial or non-commercial	Strong location model, including stadium POIs
MET Norway	No fixed account quota; fair-use rules apply	Global forecast up to 9 days	Yes, with attribution and traffic rules	Excellent open-data option if caching is implemented correctly
Open-Meteo	10,000 calls/day and 300,000/month	Hourly forecast up to 16 days	No on the hosted free endpoint	The easiest keyless prototype in this shortlist
OpenWeather	1,000 One Call requests/day free	Current, 48-hour hourly, 8-day daily, alerts and history	Yes under its open licence conditions	Broad one-response feature set; licensing needs attention
Tomorrow.io	500 requests/day, 25/hour	Current, 5-day hourly/daily and 24 hours of history	Contact the provider for a commercial plan	Rich fields and useful short-range resolution
Visual Crossing	First 1,000 records/day free	Current, history and a 15-day forecast	Yes	Particularly strong when historical match weather matters
WeatherAPI.com	100,000 calls/month	Current, 3-day forecast and 1 day of history	Yes	The clearest small commercial starting point

Allowances are not directly comparable. One provider counts HTTP requests, while another counts returned records. A forecast request may cost one unit, while an hourly historical range may cost dozens or hundreds.

1. Weatherstack

Weatherstack provides global real-time weather through a conventional JSON API. Its free plan currently includes HTTPS and 100 calls per month, but only the real-time endpoint.

That makes the free tier useful for inspecting the response shape, not for operating match pages. One hundred calls would be exhausted by checking ten venues ten times in an entire month.

The current pricing table puts 50,000 monthly calls, hourly data and historical data on the $9.99 Standard plan. The actual 7-day forecast does not appear until the $49.99 Professional plan. Commercial use is listed with paid access.

For a football site, that product split matters more than the low entry price. Current conditions can describe what is happening now, but a pre-match page needs future hourly conditions.

Best fit: Evaluating a straightforward commercial weather API with a familiar response model.

Main limitation: The free tier has no forecast and is far too small for a live product.

2. AccuWeather

AccuWeather's developer platform offers current conditions, hourly and daily forecasts, government alerts, indices, and its separate MinuteCast precipitation product.

The location model is especially relevant to football. Most weather calls use an AccuWeather location key. Its Locations API can search by coordinates and includes stadiums as a point-of-interest type. A site should resolve and store the location key when a venue is added, rather than spending an extra API call for every fixture-page request.

The free Core Weather access is now described as a 14-day trial with 500 daily calls. The $2 Starter plan includes 15,000 monthly calls, current conditions, a 12-hour forecast, and a 5-day forecast, but AccuWeather describes Starter as personal or non-commercial. The $25 Standard plan is the more relevant self-service step for a commercial site.

MinuteCast has separate allowances and pricing. A basic match page should not assume that minute-level precipitation is bundled with the normal forecast API.

Best fit: A product that values a mature location catalogue and may later add alerts or short-term precipitation.

Main limitation: The permanent low-cost tier is not a commercial production licence, and location lookup adds integration state.

3. MET Norway

The MET Norway Locationforecast API returns a global forecast for a latitude and longitude for up to nine days. The compact GeoJSON response contains the common temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind, pressure, and symbol fields needed for a match card.

There is no API key or paid tier. The service is funded as a public service, and its data is generally available under NLOD 2.0 and CC BY 4.0. Commercial reuse is possible, but attribution to MET Norway is required.

“Free” does not mean “send unlimited traffic.” The terms of service require an identifying User-Agent containing application and contact information. Clients must respect cache headers, avoid duplicate requests, limit coordinates to four decimal places, and contact MET Norway before exceeding 20 requests per second across an application. There is no SLA.

These rules align well with a football site. Forecasts should be fetched by a backend job, cached by venue and forecast issue time, and reused across every page that refers to the same stadium.

Best fit: A properly cached service that wants open, attributable global forecast data without an account.

Main limitation: There is no paid upgrade path or SLA if the public service does not meet production needs.

4. Open-Meteo

Open-Meteo is the easiest API in the shortlist to explore. The hosted free endpoint needs no API key and can return selected hourly variables for one or multiple coordinates. The default forecast is seven days and can be extended to sixteen.

Its weather variables map cleanly to football: temperature, apparent temperature, precipitation probability, rain, snowfall, weather code, visibility, wind, and gusts are all available in the main forecast endpoint. The service combines models from national weather agencies and can automatically choose a model for the requested coordinates.

The pricing page currently limits the free service to 600 calls per minute, 5,000 per hour, 10,000 per day, and 300,000 per month. The hosted free endpoint is for non-commercial use and has no uptime guarantee. A subscription moves requests to a dedicated customer endpoint, adds a commercial-use licence, and targets 99.9% uptime.

Open-Meteo also requires attribution because its underlying weather data is made available under CC BY 4.0. Its historical, ensemble, and climate APIs are useful for research, but some require a higher commercial plan than the standard forecast service.

Best fit: A keyless prototype and a clean adapter for venue-coordinate forecasts.

Main limitation: A commercial website must not treat the generous public endpoint as a free production service.

5. OpenWeather

OpenWeather offers several overlapping products, so the first integration decision is choosing the correct one.

The free-access APIs provide current weather and a 5-day forecast in 3-hour steps, with limits of 60 calls per minute and one million calls per month. The separate One Call API 3.0 is more convenient for a match page: a single coordinate request can include current conditions, a minute forecast for one hour, hourly forecasts for 48 hours, daily forecasts for eight days, government alerts, and historical endpoints. Its first 1,000 calls per day are free; further usage is pay-as-you-call and requires a separate subscription.

The licence deserves as much attention as the quota. OpenWeather's licence explanation says commercial use is permitted on the open licence, with attribution and share-alike conditions for derivative solutions. An operator should review how those conditions apply to the wider site and its distributed applications rather than assuming “commercial use allowed” settles every question.

Best fit: Receiving current, short-range, daily, alert, and historical data through one mature API family.

Main limitation: Product selection, subscription setup, and open-licence obligations make it less simple than the headline quota suggests.

6. Tomorrow.io

Tomorrow.io provides current conditions, timelines, alerts, maps, and more than 80 weather and environmental fields. The free API supports hourly and daily data from 24 hours in the past to five days ahead. Shorter timesteps are available around the present, depending on the field.

The free-plan limits are 500 requests per day, 25 per hour, and three per second. The hourly cap is the important one: an application cannot spend the daily allowance in large bursts.

For a football site, 25 hourly requests can still be workable if calls are scheduled and cached by venue. It is not workable if every page view calls Tomorrow.io directly. The free plan includes core fields and a five-day forecast; premium fields and commercial scaling require a conversation with sales rather than a public self-service price.

Best fit: A short-range forecast service where rich fields and future alerting are important.

Main limitation: The hourly limit requires disciplined caching, and production pricing is not public.

7. Visual Crossing

Visual Crossing exposes historical weather, current conditions, and forecasts through one Timeline API. A query can use coordinates, an address, a postal code, or a weather-station identifier. With no dates specified, the endpoint returns a 15-day forecast with daily and hourly data.

The free account includes the first 1,000 records per day and explicitly permits commercial use. Its accounting model needs explanation: a standard forecast for one location counts as one record, but historical daily or hourly rows count individually. The response's queryCost field should be logged so usage does not become a surprise.

Above the free allowance, the metered price is currently $0.0001 per record, while monthly plans start at $35. The pricing page also distinguishes between using data directly, storing it for internal use, and redistributing stored data externally.

This is the most attractive option in the shortlist when the product will later compare weather with match outcomes. The same adapter can request the forecast before kickoff, observed conditions after the match, and historical conditions for past fixtures.

Best fit: A commercial match-weather feature that may grow into historical analysis.

Main limitation: “Records” are not the same as requests, so historical hourly queries can consume the allowance quickly.

8. WeatherAPI.com

WeatherAPI.com combines realtime conditions, forecasts, history, location search, time-zone data, astronomy, and optional alerts behind a compact JSON or XML interface.

Its free plan currently provides 100,000 calls per month, a 3-day forecast, one day of historical weather, and commercial use. The $7 Starter plan raises the allowance to three million monthly calls and extends the forecast and history windows to seven days.

A three-day forecast is enough for the highest-traffic part of a football match page's lifecycle. The documented hourly object includes temperature, apparent temperature, condition, precipitation chance, humidity, wind, and gusts, so a useful display does not need premium environmental fields.

WeatherAPI.com also exposes a time-zone endpoint, but a football data model should still store fixture times in UTC and maintain the venue's IANA time zone separately. A weather provider should not silently become the source of truth for the match schedule.

Best fit: A small commercial site that wants a generous allowance and a low-cost path to a seven-day forecast.

Main limitation: The free forecast horizon is shorter than most alternatives in the shortlist.

Why the other 31 entries were not detailed

The remaining APIs are not necessarily poor products. They answer different questions or make a less comparable starting point for this particular feature.

• Regional public services: Aemet, Euskalmet, Hong Kong Observatory, IPMA, US Weather, HG Weather, and Yandex Weather are useful when coverage is intentionally regional, but not as the only provider for a global football site.
• Specialized environmental feeds: AQICN, AviationWeather, Hail History, OpenUV, RainViewer, Storm Glass, and WeatherTotals focus on air quality, aviation, hail, UV, radar, marine weather, or measured events rather than a basic global match forecast.
• Personal stations and utility interfaces: openSenseMap, World Time & Weather, and wttr.in can be useful data or presentation tools, but they are not the most direct production comparison here.
• More complex or overlapping products: Open-Meteo Ensemble, Meltema, Oikolab, Pirate Weather, QWeather, Rainbow Weather, Weatherbit, Foreca, and ColorfulClouds may fit specific requirements. They were left outside the detailed shortlist to keep the comparison centred on a simple global hourly forecast with clearly documented access and licensing.
• Unclear, legacy, or prototype starting points: 7Timer!, APIXU, Micro Weather, ODWeather, and the repository named weather-api require more due diligence before being treated as a current production dependency.

The screening decision is about this product, not a universal ranking.

The integration should be venue-first

A football API will normally provide a fixture and venue. The weather integration should enrich that data rather than accept arbitrary location searches from every visitor.

A practical flow is:

1. Store each venue's latitude, longitude, elevation where available, and IANA time zone.
2. Store every kickoff in UTC.
3. Fetch an hourly forecast for a narrow window around kickoff, such as two hours before to three hours after.
4. Cache the response by venue, forecast issue time, and requested time window.
5. Refresh more often as kickoff approaches, while respecting the provider's update and cache rules.
6. Show the provider attribution and a “forecast updated” timestamp.
7. Hide the card or mark it unavailable when the data is stale; never substitute a distant city's conditions without saying so.

This design prevents a popular match from producing thousands of identical weather calls.

Normalize weather before building the UI

The website should depend on an internal object rather than a provider's field names:

{
  "fixture_id": "12345",
  "venue_id": "wembley-stadium",
  "latitude": 51.556,
  "longitude": -0.2796,
  "kickoff_at_utc": "2026-09-12T14:00:00Z",
  "forecast_for_utc": "2026-09-12T14:00:00Z",
  "forecast_issued_at_utc": "2026-09-12T10:00:00Z",
  "temperature_c": 18.2,
  "feels_like_c": 17.4,
  "precipitation_probability": 42,
  "wind_speed_kph": 16.0,
  "wind_gust_kph": 27.0,
  "condition_code": "light_rain",
  "provider": "example"
}

The adapter should also preserve the provider's original condition code and units. Converting everything to a small internal vocabulary is useful for icons, but discarding the original value makes debugging much harder.

Which one would I choose?

There is no credible way to declare the “most accurate” provider from documentation alone. Forecast accuracy varies by country, model, lead time, terrain, and weather event. That requires a separate measurement study using the same stadiums and observation sources.

Based on product fit and public documentation:

• Open-Meteo is the cleanest keyless choice for building the adapter and testing the user interface, provided the prototype is non-commercial.
• MET Norway is the strongest open-data option when attribution, caching, and fair-use rules are acceptable.
• WeatherAPI.com has the clearest free commercial starting point for a small site.
• Visual Crossing is the strongest candidate when historical match weather and commercial use are important.
• OpenWeather provides the broadest convenient one-call bundle, but its subscription and licence structure deserves careful review.
• Tomorrow.io becomes interesting when richer short-range fields and alerting matter.
• AccuWeather offers a mature location model and stadium POIs, but permanent commercial access is not free.
• Weatherstack is simple to evaluate, although forecast access starts well above its free tier.

For a first production shortlist, I would compare WeatherAPI.com, Visual Crossing, MET Norway, and OpenWeather against the same set of stadiums. The comparison should record missing hourly values, forecast issue times, response stability, and licensing obligations. Accuracy should be evaluated separately against observed conditions.

Next: football data APIs

Part 3 will move to the central dependency: fixtures, live scores, match status, competitions, teams, lineups, and events. Weather and news are useful context, but the football data API determines whether the site can function at all.

No weather API provider sponsored or reviewed this article before publication.

AI disclosure: AI was used to assist with research organization and English editing. The linked official sources were checked before publication.