A football live score site needs more than scores.
The match centre may bring a visitor in, but news gives that visitor a reason to explore a team page before kickoff, return after the final whistle, and follow a competition between matchdays.
This is the first part of a survey of the public APIs needed to build a football live score site in 2026: News APIs Weather APIs for match-day context Football data APIs Series scope and ground rules The following rules apply to every article in this series: 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.
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.
Shortlisting: Every entry in the relevant category is screened, but only APIs that plausibly fit a football live score site receive a detailed review.
No implied endorsement: Inclusion in public-apis supplies the candidate pool; it does not mean that the repository or this series recommends an API.
Type of review: This is a product-fit and documentation review, not a performance benchmark.
Provider claims are identified as documented capabilities rather than independent test results.
Snapshot date: Documentation, pricing, and public usage terms were checked on September 5,
2026.
They may change, so the linked official pages remain the final source of truth.
Meaning of football: In this series, “football” means association football, also called soccer, unless stated otherwise.
Using the same source, order, and rules keeps the selection process consistent across all three parts.
For Part 1, I started with the repository's News section.
It currently contains 23 entries, but most are not realistic candidates for this use case.
Some are historical archives, RSS readers, single-topic feeds, or APIs for finance, spaceflight, and regional news.
After screening the full list in repository order, I shortlisted seven APIs that could plausibly supply news to football team, competition, or match pages.
What a football news feed actually needs A generic category is useful, but it is not enough.
Depending on the country, it may mix association football with American football, basketball, cricket, Formula 1, and other sports.
For a live score site, I would look for: Keyword and exact-phrase search for teams, competitions, and players Source and domain filters Country and language filters Publication timestamps in a consistent format Enough freshness for pre-match and post-match coverage Stable pagination and predictable rate limits Clear rights for displaying headlines, summaries, and images A realistic path from a prototype to a public website This last point matters more than the advertised request count.
A free plan with 100 requests per day is not useful in production if its license only permits local development.
Shortlist at a glance API Free allowance Free freshness Free production use Lowest listed paid plan Initial fit for a football site Mediastack 100 requests/month Free tier is mainly an evaluation tier Commercial use is listed on paid plans $24.99/month Broad coverage, but a very small free quota Currents 250 requests/day No artificial plan delay Metadata and link-out within stated terms; broader republication needs separate rights $69/month Strong candidate for a fresh headline feed GNews 100 requests/day, up to 10 articles per request 12-hour delay No; development and testing only €49.99/month Clean search API for prototypes News API 100 requests/day 24-hour delay No; development and testing only $449/month Excellent query model, expensive production step NewsData.io 200 credits/day, up to 10 articles per credit 12-hour delay Vendor says limited article metadata may be used commercially $199.99/month Strong multilingual coverage, but delayed on free The Guardian 500 requests/day Current and historical Guardian content Developer access is non-commercial Custom quote Excellent editorial source, but not an aggregator The News API 100 requests/day, 3 articles per request Listed as real-time Not sufficiently clear for me to assume $19/month Low paid entry price; clarify rights first Prices above are the displayed monthly starting prices before taxes, custom licensing, overages, or annual discounts. “Free production use” is deliberately conservative: technical API access does not automatically grant permission to republish third-party articles or images.
1.
Mediastack Mediastack advertises coverage across more than 7,500 sources and 50 countries.
Its source directory and country filters are useful for building regional football feeds rather than showing one global stream to everyone.
The current pricing page lists only 100 requests per month on the free plan.
The Standard plan begins at $24.99 per month with 10,000 monthly requests and lists historical data and commercial use among its paid capabilities.
One hundred requests per month is enough to inspect the response and build an initial adapter, but not enough to refresh a live website regularly.
Even one request every hour would require roughly 720 requests in a 30-day month.
Best fit: Evaluating a broad, conventional REST news feed with a relatively low paid entry point.
Main limitation: The free quota is much too small for an operating news module.
2.
Currents Currents provides latest-news and search endpoints with keyword, category, country, language, date, and source filters.
Its current V2 search also supports cursor pagination, which is useful for avoiding unstable page-number traversal as new stories arrive.
The free plan provides 250 requests per day, up to 20 results per request, and up to 30 days of recent history.
Currents says newly indexed stories are available to every tier without an artificial plan delay.
For a football site, that is more useful than a large but delayed quota.
A job running every ten minutes would consume 144 requests per day, leaving some capacity for team-specific searches.
The important qualification is usage rights.
Currents describes self-service access around metadata, attribution, processing, and links to original sources.
Republishing articles, retaining a long-term archive, or producing customer-facing derivative content may require separate terms.
Best fit: A prototype or small headline module that links readers to the original publishers.
Main limitation: Do not interpret API access as blanket content syndication rights.
3.
GNews GNews has a compact API with search and top-headline endpoints.
Its search syntax supports exact phrases and , , and , along with filters for language, country, date, and searched fields.
That query syntax is helpful for football.
A search for , , or by itself will produce noisy results.
Boolean expressions make it possible to combine club names with competitions, locations, or known aliases.
The free plan provides 100 requests per day, up to 10 articles per response, 30 days of history, and a 12-hour delay.
It is explicitly limited to non-commercial development and testing.
Paid production access starts at €49.99 per month and removes the artificial delay.
Best fit: Evaluating search relevance and building a non-commercial prototype.
Main limitation: The free tier cannot power a public commercial live score product.
4.
News API News API has one of the clearest query models in this group.
Its endpoint supports phrases, exclusions, Boolean operators, domains, languages, date ranges, and sorting by freshness or relevance.
Its top-headlines endpoint also includes a category.
The problem is the gap between experimentation and production.
The Developer plan provides 100 requests per day, but articles are delayed by 24 hours, CORS is restricted to localhost, and the plan is limited to development and testing.
The displayed Business plan starts at $449 per month.
This does not