Live Sports Scores API — ESPN Scores as Clean JSON (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, EPL...)

Get live sports scores, upcoming fixtures and final results for major leagues as normalized JSON — powered by ESPN's public scoreboard API. No API key, no scraping brittle HTML. One run returns every game for the leagues and date you choose: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, English Premier League (EPL), MLS, NCAA football and NCAA men's basketball.

Perfect if you searched for: live sports scores api, espn scores api, nfl nba scores json, free sports schedule api, game results json feed.

Disclaimer: This is an unofficial actor. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ESPN. Data comes from ESPN's publicly accessible JSON endpoints and may change or become unavailable at any time.

Why this actor

• ✅ Normalized schema across all leagues — same fields for NBA and Premier League.
• ✅ Live, scheduled and final games in a single dataset, with a status filter.
• ✅ Any date — today by default, or pass date for schedules & historical results.
• ✅ Fast & concurrent — leagues fetched in parallel; one failing league never kills the run.
• ✅ No auth, no proxies needed.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
leagues	array	["nba","nfl","mlb","nhl"]	League codes (see table below).
date	string	"" (today)	YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD.
statusFilter	enum	all	all, live, scheduled, or final.

Supported league codes

Code	League	ESPN path
nfl	NFL	football/nfl
nba	NBA	basketball/nba
mlb	MLB	baseball/mlb
nhl	NHL	hockey/nhl
epl	English Premier League	soccer/eng.1
mls	Major League Soccer	soccer/usa.1
ncaaf	NCAA College Football	football/college-football
ncaab	NCAA Men's Basketball	basketball/mens-college-basketball

Output schema

One dataset row per game:

Field	Type	Description
league	string	League code from input (e.g. nba).
event_id	string	ESPN event id (stable, dedupe-safe).
name	string	Full matchup, e.g. Memphis Grizzlies at Atlanta Hawks.
short_name	string	e.g. MEM @ ATL.
start_time_utc	string	ISO 8601 UTC kickoff/tip-off time.
status	string	scheduled | live | final.
status_detail	string	Human detail, e.g. Final, End of 3rd Quarter.
home_team / away_team	string	Full team names.
home_abbr / away_abbr	string	Team abbreviations.
home_score / away_score	int | null	null for scheduled games.
venue	string	Stadium/arena name.
fetched_at	string	ISO 8601 UTC fetch timestamp.

{
  "league": "nba",
  "event_id": "401898388",
  "name": "Memphis Grizzlies at Atlanta Hawks",
  "short_name": "MEM @ ATL",
  "start_time_utc": "2026-10-05T23:00:00Z",
  "status": "scheduled",
  "status_detail": "Mon, October 5th at 7:00 PM EDT",
  "home_team": "Atlanta Hawks",
  "home_abbr": "ATL",
  "home_score": null,
  "away_team": "Memphis Grizzlies",
  "away_abbr": "MEM",
  "away_score": null,
  "venue": "State Farm Arena",
  "fetched_at": "2026-07-21T15:00:00Z"
}

Use cases

• n8n / Make / Zapier automations — trigger Discord/Slack/Telegram alerts when your team's game goes final.
• Cron-scheduled score tickers — run every 2–5 minutes with statusFilter: "live" for a lightweight live-scores JSON feed for dashboards, widgets, or LED tickers.
• Sports data pipelines — nightly run with statusFilter: "final" to load results into a warehouse or Google Sheet.
• Fantasy & betting research — pull schedules ahead of time (statusFilter: "scheduled", future date).

FAQ

Do I need an ESPN API key? No. The actor uses ESPN's public, unauthenticated JSON endpoints.

Why does a league return 0 games? Offseason, or no fixtures on the requested date. The run still succeeds and logs it.

Can I get historical results? Yes — set date to a past day (e.g. 2026-01-15).

Is play-by-play or odds data included? Not currently; this actor focuses on a stable scores/schedule schema.

How is it billed? Pay-per-event: a tiny fee per score row pushed (score-row).

Is this affiliated with ESPN? No — unofficial, not affiliated with or endorsed by ESPN.