FootApi Review: Live Football Scores, Stats & Fixtures API

What FootApi does and who it is for

FootApi is a broad-coverage football data API that consolidates live match events, pre-match fixtures, team and player profiles, league metadata, rankings, and broadcast information under one interface. It is aimed at developers who need to go beyond raw scores — the API surfaces goal scorers, assistants, cards, substitutions, halftime and full-time results, match statistics, and real-time odds within individual match responses.

The scope is wide: over 500 leagues, cups, and tournaments including UEFA Champions League, Europa League, the five major European leagues (Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1), and competitions as far-reaching as the Brasileiro Série A. With 4,178 marketplace subscribers and a popularity score of 9.9 out of 10, it is one of the more widely adopted football APIs in public directories.

Key capabilities and endpoint walkthrough

FootApi exposes 100 endpoints in total. The publicly documented 40 endpoints already reveal a well-structured data model across several resource types.

Live and scheduled matches

• GET /api/matches/live returns all currently ongoing matches — the core endpoint for any live scoreboard feature.
• GET /api/matches/{day}/{month}/{year} retrieves all fixtures for a specific date, while the /top/ and /bottom/ variants let you filter to only the most or least prominent matches, which is useful if you want to surface marquee games without processing a full fixture list.
• GET /api/category/{category_id}/events/{day}/{month}/{year} narrows the fixture feed to a single competition category.

Match and team detail

• GET /api/match/{id} returns individual match data including real-time odds alongside the standard event timeline.
• GET /api/team/{id} pulls team metadata, and pairing it with /api/team/{id}/players gives you a current squad list.
• GET /api/team/{id}/tournament/{tournamentId}/season/{seasonId}/statistics returns aggregated team statistics for a specific season and competition — useful for building season-level analytics.
• GET /api/team/{id}/matches/near, /previous/{page}, and manager/{id}/matches/next/{page} provide paginated match history and upcoming fixtures for both teams and managers.

Players and managers

Player endpoints cover profile data (/player/{id}), physical and tactical attributes (/attribute, /characteristics), a near-match list (/matches/near), and a profile image (/player/{id}/image). Manager endpoints mirror this structure and add a career history endpoint (/manager/{id}/history). This makes it feasible to build detailed player cards or manager dossiers without needing supplemental data sources.

Rankings and tournaments

• GET /api/rankings/fifa returns official FIFA national team rankings.
• GET /api/rankings/uefa/clubs and /rankings/uefa/countries deliver UEFA coefficient tables.
• Tournament discovery works through /api/tournament/categories followed by /api/tournament/all/category/{category_id}, giving you a traversable hierarchy from sport down to individual league.

TV, media, and venues

The TV endpoints (/api/tv/country/{countryCode}/channels, /api/tv/channel/{id}/schedule) let you surface broadcast channel availability and schedules by country — a differentiator if you're building a companion app where users want to know where to watch a match. Venue endpoints return event lists and images for stadiums. The video highlights coverage spans La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Copa del Rey, DFB-Pokal, Coppa Italia, and UEFA club competitions.

Search

GET /api/search/{term} searches across teams, players, and tournaments simultaneously, while GET /api/search/{entityType} allows filtering by type. These endpoints are the natural starting point if users input free-text queries in your UI.

Pricing breakdown

FootApi uses a freemium model with four tiers. The key variables are daily request quota, per-second rate limit, and whether overage is billed or blocked.

The BASIC tier is genuinely limited: 50 requests per day at 4 requests per second. At that quota, you can fetch a live match list plus a handful of individual match details per day — enough for personal experimentation or verifying response shapes, but not for any user-facing product. Even a simple live scoreboard page refreshing every 60 seconds would exhaust 50 requests in under an hour.

PRO at $9.99/month opens up 15,000 daily requests with overage billed at $0.0001 per request — meaning 5,000 extra requests would add $0.50. This is workable for small applications with moderate traffic or for infrequent batch jobs.

ULTRA doubles the daily ceiling to 50,000 requests for an extra $5. At one request per second around the clock, 50,000 requests represents roughly 14 hours of sustained throughput — adequate for a mid-sized app that polls live data during peak hours only.

MEGA at $24.99/month removes the daily cap (billed monthly in aggregate) and raises the rate limit to 10 req/s. The marketplace marks this as the recommended plan. For any production application running live score polling across multiple concurrent users, MEGA eliminates the need to track daily burn rates.

Practical use cases

• Live scoreboard widgets: Poll /api/matches/live on an interval to display scores with goal scorer and card data.
• Fantasy football integrations: Player attributes, characteristics, and near-match endpoints provide the statistical inputs fantasy platforms need per game week.
• Club and competition pages: Combine team detail, squad, season statistics, and fixture endpoints to populate a full club profile page without additional scraping.
• Broadcast companion apps: TV channel and schedule endpoints answer the question "where can I watch this match?" by country.
• Ranking dashboards: FIFA and UEFA coefficient endpoints give you authoritative national and club ranking data without manual curation.

Limitations and things to check before integrating

FootApi notes that all statistics are sourced from third-party providers; the API's role is collection and presentation rather than primary data generation. Developers who require SLA guarantees on data accuracy should account for the possibility of upstream delays or corrections, particularly for live event timelines.

The free tier's 50-request daily cap is extremely low for any real application, so plan your tier selection based on your polling strategy before launch. On PRO and ULTRA, overage is metered at $0.0001 per request, so it is worth implementing a request counter and alerting threshold to avoid surprise costs.

Only 40 of the 100 endpoints are documented in the public listing. The remaining 60 endpoints are not described here, so it is worth reviewing the full API documentation on the marketplace before committing to an integration to confirm the additional coverage meets your needs.

Getting started

FootApi is available through the RapidAPI marketplace. Subscribe to the BASIC plan to obtain your API key and explore the response structure with no upfront cost. A sensible first call is GET /api/matches/{day}/{month}/{year} with today's date, which returns the full fixture list and gives you the match IDs needed to drill into individual game data. From there, the tournament category hierarchy (/api/tournament/categories) helps you map competition IDs for any league-specific filtering you need.