TheSportsDB Scraper — Teams, Players & Match Results | $2/1K | Free API

For sports app developers, fantasy sports platforms, betting data pipelines, and sports analytics teams that need clean, structured multi-sport data without managing API auth and rate limits.

$2.00 per 1,000 results (teams, players, or match events). Zero proxy cost — TheSportsDB has a public free API. Bring your own premium key for higher rate limits.

This actor calls TheSportsDB's official public API. No scraping, no access friction — pure structured JSON from the source. One actor, 20+ sports.

Source	Cost	Structured JSON?	MCP-ready?	Multi-sport?
This actor	$2/1k	Yes	Yes	Yes
TheSportsDB directly	Free (rate-limited)	Yes	No	Yes
SportRadar API	$$$ (enterprise)	Yes	No	Yes
RapidAPI sports APIs	$5-50/mo	Partial	No	Partial

Scrape sports data from TheSportsDB official free API. Search teams by name or league, find players, and retrieve upcoming or past match results — all via the official public JSON API with no proxy, no authentication, and zero COGS.

Features

• Teams — search any team by name or browse all teams in a league. Returns team metadata: ID, sport, league, country, stadium, founding year, badge image URL.
• Players — search players by name. Returns position, nationality, DOB, status, photo URL.
• Events — retrieve upcoming or past match events for given team IDs. Past events include final scores; upcoming events show venue and kickoff date.
• parse_confidence — every row carries a quality score (0.0–1.0) and a warnings list so you can detect drift or incomplete records automatically.
• Optional API key — works out of the box with the free public test key 3. Supply your own premium key for higher rate limits.
• Pay per result — you only pay for records returned, not for empty pages.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	teams	teams / players / events
searchQueries	string[]	["Arsenal"]	Team or player names to search
leagues	string[]	[]	League names to browse all teams for
teamIds	string[]	[]	Team IDs for event mode
eventType	string	next	next (upcoming) or last (past with scores)
maxItems	integer	100	Max total items (0 = unlimited)
apiKey	string	(test key)	Optional premium API key
requestDelayMs	integer	200	ms between requests

Output schema

Every row has entity_type = "team" / "player" / "event" plus these fields:

Field	Populated for
name	all
team_id / event_id / player_id	respective entity type
sport	all
league	teams, events; also holds team name for players
country / nationality	teams / players
stadium / formed_year / badge_url	teams
position / date_of_birth / player_status / photo_url	players
date / home_team / away_team / home_score / away_score / venue / event_status	events
parse_confidence	all (1.0 = all fields present)
warnings	all (list of missing-field codes)

Example: get all Premier League teams

{
  "mode": "teams",
  "leagues": ["English Premier League"]
}

Example: get upcoming Arsenal matches

{
  "mode": "events",
  "teamIds": ["133604"],
  "eventType": "next"
}

Pricing

Pay per result (sports-item event). Default: $2.00 per 1,000 records.

Pricing example: All 20 Premier League teams = $0.04. 5 teams × upcoming 5 events each = 25 events = $0.05. 1,000 player records = $2.00.

FAQ

Do I need an API key or proxy? No. The actor works out of the box with TheSportsDB's free public test key 3 — no account, no proxy, no extra setup. Optionally supply your own premium key for higher rate limits.

What sports are covered? TheSportsDB covers 20+ sports: soccer, basketball, baseball, American football, hockey, tennis, cricket, rugby, and more. Use mode=teams with a league name to see all teams for any sport.

How do I find a team ID? Run mode=teams with searchQueries: ["Arsenal"] — the response includes team_id (e.g. 133604). Use that ID in mode=events to get match results.

What happens if a query returns no results? The actor logs a warning and continues to the next query — it never crashes. Empty results are not charged.

Can I export results to Google Sheets or Airtable? Yes — connect via the n8n or Make integration, or use the Apify dataset export (JSON, CSV, or Excel).

Data source

TheSportsDB — community-built sports database with official REST API. Free test key 3 is publicly documented. Not affiliated with TheSportsDB.

parse_confidence trust score

Every row carries a parse_confidence score (0.0–1.0) and a warnings list so you can detect drift or incomplete records automatically.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This actor is available as an MCP tool for Claude, GPT-4o, or any MCP-compatible agent.

Config: https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=bovi/sportsdb-scraper

Integrations

Built for sports-app developers, fantasy platforms, and analytics teams ingesting multi-sport team, player, and match data — the JSON/dataset output drops into the tools you already run, no glue code:

• n8n / Make / Zapier — trigger a run or pipe every new dataset item into 500+ apps (Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, HubSpot, your database) with no code: n8n, Make, Zapier.
• Webhooks — fire your own endpoint the moment a run finishes, to push results straight into your pipeline (docs).
• MCP server — expose this actor as a tool to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client so an AI agent can pull this data mid-conversation (guide).
• API & SDKs — fetch the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel through the Apify REST API or the Python / JS SDKs.

See all Apify integrations.

Legal

TheSportsDB data is community-maintained and publicly documented under their API terms. Scraping public API endpoints of a service that explicitly provides a public API key for that purpose is consistent with standard API usage.

Usage statistics

This Actor creates a small, content-free summary at the end of each run. It is used only to monitor reliability and improve this Actor. A copy is saved as USAGE_STATS in your own Apify key-value store, so you can see the exact record created for your run.

Set disableUsageStats to true in the input to opt out. Nothing is sent then; your USAGE_STATS record only says that statistics were disabled.

Only these fields are recorded:

• schema version, Actor name and build number;
• UTC start and finish hour (not a precise timestamp);
• run duration, number of results and time to the first result, each as a coarse range;
• whether the result was empty, the end status, and an error type from a fixed list;
• memory setting and counts of charged events;
• names of the input fields you set, never their values;
• the selected option for input fields that offer a fixed list of choices (for example a sort order).

We do not collect input text, search terms, URLs, domains, usernames, email addresses, names, proxy credentials, tokens, scraped records, output items, raw error messages, stack traces, or hashes of any of those values. Records are kept for no longer than 13 months, used only as aggregated operational statistics, and never sold or shared.

Additional fields (Phase 2)

This Actor also records your Apify user ID, whether Apify marks the account as paying, the size range of list inputs, the selected country when the input offers a fixed list of countries, and one category from a fixed Actor taxonomy. We use these fields only for aggregate reliability, repeat-use and cross-Actor analysis; reports suppress any cell with fewer than five distinct users.

The same disableUsageStats: true input flag turns these fields off too. The user ID is removed after 13 months; we do not export, sell, share, or attempt to re-identify this data.

Run-outcome signals (v2)

To learn whether a run did what it was asked to do, the record also holds a few more coarse ranges and yes/no flags. None of them contains content:

• the result limit you asked for (a range, when the input has one) and what share of it was delivered;
• results delivered per input item you listed (a range);
• output quality as ranges: how fully the result fields were filled, the share of rows that look like errors, the share of duplicate rows, and how many different fields appeared. These are counted in memory while results are saved; no result content is kept;
• how the run was started (console, API, schedule, webhook, another Actor);
• how it ended: stopped by you, timed out, reached the requested limit, stopped by the charge limit, and how many times the platform moved the run;
• if this Actor reports it: how many items to process worked or failed (ranges) and one failure reason from a fixed list;
• a short code made from the names of the input fields you set, never their values.

Repeat-run fingerprint (v2)

When your Apify user ID is recorded (see above), the record also holds an 8-character one-way code made from your input (proxy settings left out) and this Actor's name. It only lets us see that the same account ran the same input again soon after an unsatisfying run; we never see the input itself. It is stored only in the database, never published, and reports use it in aggregate with the same five-user minimum. It is the one exception to the statement above that no hashes are collected, and disableUsageStats: true turns it off.