What SofaSport covers and who it is for
SofaSport targets developers building sports applications that need more than raw scores — think fantasy sports platforms, betting analytics tools, fan apps, journalism dashboards, or scouting utilities. The API spans 24 distinct sports: Football (Soccer), Tennis, Basketball, Ice Hockey, Handball, Volleyball, Table Tennis, Baseball, American Football, MMA, Motorsport, Cricket, Rugby, Darts, Snooker, Futsal, Badminton, Aussie Rules, Beach Volleyball, Waterpolo, Cycling, Floorball, Bandy, and Esports.
The breadth is the headline feature. Most sports APIs either go deep on a single sport or stay shallow across many; SofaSport attempts both by structuring its data around a consistent hierarchy — sport → category (country/region) → tournament → season → event — that works across all supported sports. Once you understand that hierarchy, navigating from a top-level sport ID down to an individual match is straightforward.
Endpoint walkthrough
The API currently exposes 100 endpoints across 14 resource groups. Here is a breakdown of what each group gives you:
Sports and categories
GET /v1/sports returns the master list of sports with their IDs and slugs — the starting point for every downstream query. /v1/sports/number-live gives you a real-time count of live events across all sports, useful for a global dashboard widget. Category endpoints let you filter by sport to get country or regional groupings, and a /v1/categories/number-live variant narrows it to live counts per category.
Calendar and scheduling
Two calendar endpoints handle date-based discovery. /v1/calendar/categories returns which categories have events on a specific date for a given sport (requires date in YYYY-MM-DD and a timezone offset from -11 to 13). /v1/calendar/daily-unique-tournaments returns tournament activity over an entire month, which is helpful for pre-populating calendars or checking fixture density before building schedule pages.
The events scheduling group has three main modes: schedule by live (/v1/events/schedule/live), schedule by category and date (/v1/events/schedule/category, which replaces the deprecated date endpoint), and a popular events endpoint that surfaces today's trending matches.
Tournament and season data
Tournaments are split into "unique tournaments" (the competition itself, e.g., Premier League) and specific tournament instances within them. You can retrieve metadata, all historical seasons, featured events, media assets, and logos. Season endpoints expose standings (total, home, or away splits), cup/knockout bracket trees, round listings, and aggregate season statistics like goals and wins.
Events — the data core
This is where the depth shows. A single event ID unlocks:
- Statistics (
/v1/events/statistics) — match stats for standard sports - Shotmap (
/v1/events/shotmap) — shot locations, useful for football - Heatmap (
/v1/events/heatmap) — team-level spatial data - Player heatmap (
/v1/events/player-heatmap) — individual player positional effort - Player rating breakdown (
/v1/events/player-rating-breakdown) — component scores behind a player's match rating - Best players (
/v1/events/best-players) — top performers for the event - H2H stats and events — historical head-to-head records
- Streaks — current form streaks per team
- Odds — winning odds and all available odds (with Bet365 as provider ID 1), returnable in decimal format
- Graph points — momentum graph data for the match
- Point-by-point — tennis-specific granular scoring
- Innings — cricket-specific data
- Esports games, statistics, and lineups — dedicated endpoints for esports events
- Comments, fan ratings, media — social and broadcast-adjacent data
Players, managers, and transfers
Player endpoints return profile data, characteristics (strengths and weaknesses), heatmaps per player, transfer history, and statistics (with a regularSeason parameter for hockey). Manager endpoints cover career history, photo assets, and events managed. A dedicated transfers resource lets you query transfer activity independently of individual player records.
Additional resources
Rankings, referees, TV broadcast data, and motorsport-specific stage data round out the API. The TV endpoint is notable for any app that needs to surface where a match can be watched.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Monthly requests | Rate limit | Overage per request |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BASIC | $0 | 200 | Not specified | $0.0020 |
| PRO | $15 | 10,000 | 5 / second | $0.0020 |
| ULTRA | $70 | 90,000 | 5 / second | $0.0020 |
The free BASIC tier's 200 monthly requests is enough for exploration and initial integration testing, but it will not sustain any user-facing application. Even a simple app that polls live scores every minute for a few hours will exhaust it. The overage rate of $0.002 per request applies to all plans, so on BASIC you would pay $0.002 each after 200 calls — costs can accumulate quickly if you forget to cap usage.
PRO at $15/month gives 10,000 requests, which suits a modest app with a small active user base or a personal project that queries infrequently. ULTRA's 90,000 requests at $70/month is the tier where production applications with real traffic will generally land. For requirements beyond that, the provider accepts custom and enterprise inquiries via email ([email protected]) and Telegram.
Note that both PRO and ULTRA share a 5-requests-per-second rate limit. For burst-heavy use cases — like loading a full match page that fires 8–10 endpoint calls simultaneously — you will need to serialize or queue requests to stay within this limit.
Practical use cases
- Betting analytics dashboards: The combination of odds endpoints, H2H statistics, streaks, and player ratings gives you the raw material to build pre-match analysis pages.
- Fantasy sports engines: Player characteristics, per-match ratings, and transfer history are exactly what fantasy scoring and transfer recommendation features need.
- Fan apps: Live schedule, scores, media, comments, and fan ratings cover the content mix most fan applications display.
- Scouting tools: Heatmaps, player statistics across seasons, and characteristic breakdowns (strengths/weaknesses) are useful inputs for scout reporting workflows.
- Broadcast and editorial: The TV endpoint and media resources make it possible to surface broadcast information alongside editorial content.
Limitations to evaluate before integrating
Two numbers in the fact sheet deserve direct attention.
Average success rate: 74%. This means roughly one in four API calls is currently returning an error or failing outright. For a sports score widget that a user can refresh, occasional failures are acceptable with good error handling. For automated pipelines, data ingestion jobs, or anything that must reliably capture live data as it happens, a 74% success rate represents a meaningful risk. Before committing to production use, test the specific endpoints your application depends on over a representative period to understand whether this average reflects transient issues or structural reliability problems.
Average latency: 789 ms. Sub-second latency is technically acceptable for most data fetching, but it sits on the slower side. If your application needs to display live data with minimal perceived lag — especially combined with the 5/second rate limit forcing sequential calls — user experience could degrade. Caching aggressively and fetching only changed data will be necessary.
The free tier's 200-request ceiling is also a practical constraint: do not build any logic that assumes free-tier availability for production traffic.
Getting started
SofaSport is accessed through RapidAPI. After subscribing, all requests go to https://sofasport.p.rapidapi.com with two required headers:
X-RapidAPI-Key: YOUR_API_KEY
X-RapidAPI-Host: sofasport.p.rapidapi.comThe recommended starting path is: call /v1/sports to get sport IDs → /v1/categories?sport_id=1 to find a category → /v1/unique-tournaments?category_id=20 for tournaments → /v1/unique-tournaments/seasons for seasons → event or standings endpoints from there. The provider's complete tutorial is at https://sofasport.rapi.one/Complete_Tutorial, and an OpenAPI specification is available at https://hugeapi.com/collection/sofascores for generating client code or importing into tools like Postman.
