Football data & coverage

Different feeds do different jobs. A score on the scoreboard is not automatically a verified result in the prediction ledger. The ledger's result-checking pipeline matches its fixture identities against the historical results source.

Fixtures and historical results

Football-Data.co.uk supplies the existing fixture and historical CSV feeds. Fixtures refresh hourly and result files are cached for six hours. This is a final-results feed, not a live-score service. The prediction record includes all fixtures admitted by this feed, including those without predictions.

Market sentiment

Public market data feeds provide separately cached market prices, volume, liquidity, team emblems and price history. Our football provider remains authoritative for model fixtures and results. A separate market catalog adds clearly labeled market-only matches for broader competition coverage; those matches have no model forecast and do not enter its accuracy record. The market catalog refreshes every fifteen minutes and covers the next fourteen days where individual match markets are available. Prices are market sentiment, not guaranteed probabilities. Our published model remains separate and may already use bookmaker odds. Compare the signals.

Markets refresh every five minutes; team metadata daily; historical prices and derivative markets every fifteen minutes. Stale prices are excluded from live gap rankings. First and last observed pre-match values are preserved; later API history cannot become a backdated forecast.

Club crests and identity

Market data team records are matched by competition, normalized names and reviewed aliases. Existing sources remain fallbacks when a verified emblem is unavailable.

TheSportsDB supplies free, limited league team lists, cached for seven days. Its free team lists return at most ten teams, so crest coverage is partial. We match league-scoped team names and explicit aliases. An unmatched club gets a neutral initials badge. We never invent an official club crest.

Artwork remains the property of its rights holders. Its presence identifies a team and does not imply sponsorship or endorsement. TheSportsDB's terms distinguish API access from third-party artwork rights.

German scores and tables

OpenLigaDB provides community-maintained Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga scores, fixtures and tables under the Open Database License. Score snapshots refresh every two minutes; tables hourly. Anyone with provider permissions can update the results, so corrections and delays are possible. The feed has no reliable in-play clock. We show “Reported” or “Unconfirmed” rather than infer “Live” from kickoff time.

Original OpenLigaDB snapshots can be downloaded from the source data endpoint, with attribution and license metadata. These are a separate dataset from the prediction ledger.

Optional wider live-score coverage

API-Football has a free plan with 100 requests/day, with season and competition availability determined by the provider. Kickstatix includes a connection that polls today's fixtures every 20 minutes with a local 90-call safety budget. It needs the owner's API key. This is a periodic live-score snapshot, not second-by-second coverage. Its status and age appear on the scoreboard.

API-Football also offers injuries and lineups. Those endpoints are not currently used as predictive features: timestamped history and chronological evaluation are required first. Provider terms leave third-party data and trademark permissions to the publisher.

Other options researched

football-data.org offers a free 12-competition tier with tables and delayed scores. TheSportsDB live scores are a premium feature. No football MCP is installed in this workspace; the website uses documented APIs directly, which avoids a separate AI tool dependency for routine polling.