Sports Scores & Schedules API — NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Soccer

Scores, schedules, standings, teams and headlines for any league ESPN covers — the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, WNBA, college football and basketball, 33 soccer competitions from the Premier League to the Champions League, F1, NASCAR, golf, tennis and the UFC — as clean, flat rows in one schema. Live and final scores, status, records, venues, broadcasts and the public pre-game line on every game. No API key, no login, no browser.

Where the data comes from. This Actor reads ESPN's public site API (site.api.espn.com) — an unofficial, public JSON feed: keyless, undocumented, used by many tools and stable for years, but the format may change without notice. This Actor is not affiliated with ESPN, any league or any team. It returns no player data: teams, games, scores, venues, records, odds and standings only.

At a glance

Input — this is the Store prefill; paste it and run:

{ "leagues": ["nfl", "nba"], "mode": "scoreboard" }

Every game on today's NFL and NBA slates, in two requests. Two leagues, so that one of them is always in season. Change mode for the other four: schedule, standings, teams, news.

Output — one row per game; the fields you will use most are startTime, name, status, homeTeam, homeScore, awayTeam, awayScore, venue, broadcasts and spread (full list under Output reference). Standings, teams and headlines come back on the same columns. Anything that could not be read comes back as a free diagnostic row (rowType: "diagnostic", errorType, error) instead of a charge.

Price — $0.80 per 1,000 games on the FREE tier (standings rows and teams $0.0004, headlines $0.0003, + $0.001 per run, charged only once a run has returned something). League summary rows, diagnostic rows, a league that is out of season and a request ESPN refused are all free, and a run that returns nothing bills nothing at all. Pay-per-event, limited permissions — works over the Apify MCP server (mcp.apify.com) and with agentic (x402) payments.

From code — client.actor("insight.solutions/sports-scores-api").call(run_input={…}) with apify-client, or

POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/insight.solutions~sports-scores-api/run-sync-get-dataset-items

What you get

One row per game. Same columns whatever the league.

A game that has not started yet (the NFL's Monday night game, 2026-10-05):

{
  "rowType": "game",
  "league": "nfl",
  "sport": "football",
  "gameId": "401872979",
  "season": 2026,
  "seasonType": "regular-season",
  "week": 4,
  "startTime": "2026-10-06T00:15:00.000Z",
  "startTimeLocal": "Mon, October 5th at 8:15 PM EDT",
  "name": "Atlanta Falcons at New Orleans Saints",
  "shortName": "ATL @ NO",
  "eventType": "game",
  "status": "scheduled",
  "completed": false,
  "homeTeam": "New Orleans Saints",
  "homeAbbr": "NO",
  "homeScore": null,
  "homeRecord": "1-2",
  "awayTeam": "Atlanta Falcons",
  "awayAbbr": "ATL",
  "awayScore": null,
  "awayRecord": "1-2",
  "venue": "Caesars Superdome",
  "venueCity": "New Orleans",
  "venueState": "LA",
  "indoor": true,
  "broadcasts": ["ESPN"],
  "spread": "NO -1.5",
  "overUnder": 47.5,
  "oddsProvider": "DraftKings",
  "weather": "Cloudy",
  "temperatureF": 79,
  "url": "https://www.espn.com/nfl/game/_/gameId/401872979/falcons-saints"
}

The same game once it is over carries the score, the winner and the gate — here Chiefs at Raiders the day before:

{
  "rowType": "game",
  "gameId": "401872976",
  "name": "Kansas City Chiefs at Las Vegas Raiders",
  "status": "final",
  "statusDetail": "Final",
  "period": 4,
  "homeAbbr": "LV",
  "homeScore": 27,
  "homeRecord": "3-1",
  "awayAbbr": "KC",
  "awayScore": 30,
  "awayRecord": "4-0",
  "winnerTeamId": "12",
  "attendance": 62593,
  "broadcasts": ["CBS"]
}

A standings line, with every stat ESPN lists kept in stats:

{
  "rowType": "standing",
  "league": "nfl",
  "season": 2026,
  "group": "American Football Conference",
  "teamId": "12",
  "team": "Kansas City Chiefs",
  "abbr": "KC",
  "rank": 1,
  "wins": 4,
  "losses": 0,
  "ties": 0,
  "winPercent": 1,
  "gamesBehind": 0,
  "pointsFor": 118,
  "pointsAgainst": 77,
  "pointDifferential": 41,
  "streak": "W4",
  "stats": { "W": "4", "L": "0", "PCT": "1.000", "SEED": "1", "Home": "2-0", "Road": "2-0", "vs. Div.": "2-0", "…": "…" }
}

A team:

{
  "rowType": "team",
  "league": "nba",
  "teamId": "1",
  "team": "Atlanta Hawks",
  "abbr": "ATL",
  "location": "Atlanta",
  "nickname": "Hawks",
  "slug": "atlanta-hawks",
  "color": "c8102e",
  "logoUrl": "https://a.espncdn.com/i/teamlogos/nba/500/atl.png",
  "url": "https://www.espn.com/nba/team/_/name/atl/atlanta-hawks"
}

A headline:

{
  "rowType": "article",
  "league": "nfl",
  "articleId": "50112291",
  "headline": "McVay: Rams coaches will 'learn' from incident with Eagles fans",
  "summary": "Rams coach Sean McVay says his assistant coaches will learn from their viral interaction with Eagles fans during Sunday's win over Philadelphia.",
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-05T22:32:59.000Z",
  "url": "https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/50112291/mcvay-rams-coaches-learn-incident-eagles-fans",
  "imageUrl": "https://a.espncdn.com/photo/2026/1005/r1726550_600x400_3-2.jpg",
  "categories": ["NFL", "Los Angeles Rams", "Philadelphia Eagles"]
}

And one free league row per league per run, saying what ESPN listed and what came back: leagueName, season, seasonType, week, games (on the slate, before any filter) and returned.

Quick start

League slugs

The ones people use most. The full table (51 leagues) is bundled in src/leagues.json.

Every soccer slug in the table is one ESPN itself lists — it lists 219 soccer competitions in all. Any ESPN path works too: soccer/arg.1, soccer/bra.1, or anything else of the form <sport>/<league> for a sport in the table is passed through as written. A slug the Actor does not recognise comes back as a free league-not-found row naming the three nearest ("nfll" → nfl).

Modes

Races and tournaments. An F1, NASCAR or IndyCar weekend is one row with eventType: "race"; a golf or tennis tournament or a UFC card is one row with eventType: "tournament". Their name, dates, status, venue (the circuit, for a race) and broadcasts are there; their competitors are individual athletes and are not — see No player data. For the same reason schedule, standings and teams are not available for those sports, and asking for them returns a free unsupported row.

Teams for schedule are ids or abbreviations (13, LAL; full names like Los Angeles Lakers work too), resolved through the league's team list, which is read once. With more than one league, scope an entry as nba:LAL — 13 is the Lakers in the NBA and the Raiders in the NFL, and an unscoped entry is tried in every league you list. A game between two teams you asked for is returned once. The schedule is the season type ESPN currently serves for that team — during the preseason, the preseason games.

Input

Inputs that belong to another mode are ignored, not errors. An input with nothing usable in it — no league the Actor knows, a schedule run with no team, dates none of which is a date — finishes FAILED before a single request is sent, with a free row saying why.

Output reference

rowType is one of six. Four are charged, two are free.

Every row carries ok, rowType, input, error, errorType, scrapedAt, source (site.api.espn.com), sourceUrl (the exact API URL) and null in every column that does not apply — so a CSV export is one rectangular table however the run was configured.

Game columns, normalised

• status is one of six: scheduled, in_progress, final, postponed, canceled, delayed, mapped from ESPN's STATUS_* names (halftime and the break between periods are in_progress). statusDetail keeps ESPN's own line — "Final", "Final/OT", the period and clock.
• Scores are numbers on scoreboards and schedules alike (ESPN writes them as "27" on one and { "value": 27 } on the other), and null before a game starts — ESPN prints 0, which would read as a nil-nil.
• startTime is ISO 8601 UTC. startTimeLocal is ESPN's own text for a game not yet started ("Mon, October 5th at 8:15 PM EDT" — US Eastern in every capture).
• homeRecord / awayRecord are the season record. In the MLB postseason ESPN also attaches the series record; that one is not used.
• clock only while a game is live; period once it has started; attendance once it has been played.

The pre-game line

With includeOdds on, spread, overUnder and oddsProvider are the public pre-game line ESPN lists, exactly as it lists it — informational, not advice. spread is ESPN's own line text: a point spread for football and basketball ("NO -1.5"), and for hockey and soccer the moneyline ESPN shows in the same place ("TB -218", "ARS -260"). Finished games usually carry no line at all.

Standings columns

rank is ESPN's rank where it gives one, else the playoff seed, else the line's place in the table — the NFL table is sorted by win percentage, not by seed. wins, losses, ties, winPercent, gamesBehind, pointsFor, pointsAgainst, pointDifferential and streak are pulled out as columns; stats keeps every stat ESPN lists, abbreviation to display value, with the splits that have no abbreviation (Home, Road, vs. Div.) keyed by name. group is the conference, division or table.

Diagnostic rows

errorType is one of league-not-found, team-not-found, no-games, no-results, not-found, unsupported, invalid-input, truncated, blocked, timeout, unavailable. None of them is ever charged for. A run whose input was usable but produced only these — a league out of season, a team ESPN does not list, a request ESPN refused — finishes SUCCEEDED with zero results, a status message that says so, and a free row per problem telling you why; nothing is charged, start fee included.

No player data

This Actor returns teams, games, scores, venues, records, odds and standings only — no player data. ESPN's payloads are full of people: game leaders with names, headshots and jersey numbers, winning and losing pitchers, goal scorers, the drivers in a race, rosters, and a byline on every article. None of it is emitted. Every column is built field by field from a named path and nothing is passed through, so there is no athlete, leaders or byline field anywhere in the dataset; the offline suite collects every athlete name in every captured payload and checks that none of them reaches a row.

The one place a person can still be named is ESPN's own editorial text: a headline such as "Cowboys' Tyler Smith hoping to be ready to face Bucs" is the headline, and it is returned as written. An article's categories list the leagues and teams it is filed under, never the players or the writer.

Being a good citizen

The feed is free and public, which is a reason to be careful with it:

• Each scoreboard is polled once per run. ESPN serves it with cache-control: max-age=6; asking twice in one run would be asking for the same answer. Two spellings of one league, overlapping date ranges and a team list needed by several team entries are all one request.
• Never more than four requests in flight, started at least 200 ms apart, across the whole run, whatever maxConcurrency says; and a 250–600 ms pause between successive requests for one league (the days of a range, the teams of a schedule).
• Requests carry an ordinary browser User-Agent: ESPN's CDN answers HTTP 403 to any other string, so a self-naming one is not an option here.
• A 403 or 429 is a block: the proxy session is rotated once, and a second refusal becomes a free blocked row rather than a retry loop.

What you are never charged for

• The league row, one per league per run.
• Every diagnostic row.
• A league with no games on the dates asked for — out of season, an off day.
• Finished games dropped by includeCompleted: false, games past maxGamesPerLeague, and a game already returned for another date or team.
• Leagues and teams the Actor or ESPN does not know.
• Requests that were blocked, failed or timed out.
• A run that returns nothing at all: it finishes SUCCEEDED with zero results and a "0 results" status message, and bills nothing, start fee included.

Pricing

$0.80 per 1,000 games.

Charging is charge-after-push: rows are in your dataset before the event is recorded. ACTOR_MAX_TOTAL_CHARGE_USD is respected — the run stops fetching when it is reached and finishes SUCCEEDED saying so.

Proxy

The default is { "useApifyProxy": true } — Apify's datacenter pool, which is what the capture this Actor was built on came through. You can switch to residential if your runs start getting blocked; you will not get different data.

Use it from an AI agent, or from code

One JSON object in, one flat array out — the shape agent runtimes want. The Actor runs with limited permissions, uses pay-per-event pricing and never enters Standby, so it works over the Apify MCP server and with x402 agentic payments. The Integrations tab pushes results to Slack, a webhook, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, Snowflake or BigQuery.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/insight.solutions~sports-scores-api/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"leagues":["nfl","eng.1"],"mode":"scoreboard","includeCompleted":false}'

# pip install apify-client
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("insight.solutions/sports-scores-api").call(run_input={
    "leagues": ["nba", "nhl"],
    "dates": ["2026-10-20..2026-10-26"],
})

for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if row.get("ok") and row["rowType"] == "game":
        print(row["startTime"], row["shortName"], row["status"],
              row["awayScore"], row["homeScore"], row["venue"], sep=" | ")

Schedule it hourly on game days for a cheap scores feed: each run reads every scoreboard once, and an idle league costs nothing.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. The feed is public and keyless, and this Actor sends no cookies and no credentials of anybody's.

Is this real-time? Each run reads ESPN's scoreboard as it stands at that moment, which ESPN itself caches for six seconds. A run is a snapshot; for a live ticker, schedule runs.

Why is homeScore null for a game that has not started? Because it has no score. ESPN prints 0 there, and a column that read 0-0 before kickoff would be wrong in every aggregate you built on it.

Why is spread a moneyline for hockey and soccer? Because that is what ESPN shows in that place for those sports, and the column is "the line ESPN lists", copied as-is rather than reinterpreted.

Why can't I get F1 standings or a tennis draw? Because they are tables of drivers and players, and this Actor returns no player data. Race weekends and tournaments are on the scoreboard as rows of their own.

What happens out of season? The league's scoreboard is empty, and you get a free no-games row for it and nothing billed. The run still SUCCEEDS. Pass dates to read a past or future day.

What happens if the format changes? The feed is unofficial and can change. If a response stops parsing, the run returns a free diagnostic row naming the request rather than a wrong number. A run that returned no real row finishes SUCCEEDED with zero results and a "0 results" status message pointing at those rows, and bills nothing.

Is this affiliated with ESPN or the leagues? No. It reads a public feed and links back to every game and story on espn.com. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to ESPN, any league or any team.

Limitations

• The upstream format may change. ESPN's site API is undocumented and unofficial; it has been stable for years, and that is all anyone can say.
• No player data, by design — no leaders, box scores, rosters, player stats, drivers or bylines. Headlines are ESPN's text and may name people.
• One snapshot per run. Each scoreboard is read once; nothing is polled.
• A schedule is the season type ESPN currently serves. During the preseason a team's schedule is its preseason games.
• College football is the FBS slate. The scoreboard is asked for FBS (groups=80, up to 100 games a day); FCS and lower divisions are not included.
• Soccer outside the table needs its ESPN path (soccer/arg.1). ESPN lists 219 competitions; 33 of them have a slug here.
• Standings and team lists for the less-covered leagues (college sports, minor soccer competitions) have not been checked against a capture; if ESPN has none, the row says so for free.

Our other Actors

Every Insight Solutions Actor is pay-per-result with no browser, no login and no API key, and every one of them returns free diagnostic rows instead of billing for failures. Prices are per 1,000 results.

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• YouTube Transcript API — captions as timed segments, text, SRT or VTT, with language fallback and translation.
• YouTube Comments API — comments and replies with likes, pinned and hearted flags, newest or top sort.
• YouTube Channel API — a channel's videos, Shorts and live streams, plus YouTube search.
• Podcast Search, Episodes & Charts API — Apple Podcasts search, charts and full episode feeds.
• Bluesky Scraper — profiles, posts, followers and follows from the public AT Protocol API.
• Telegram Channel Scraper — posts, views and channel stats from public Telegram channels.
• Substack Scraper — posts with full free text, comments and publication profiles.
• Hacker News API — stories, comments, users, front page and a structured "Who is hiring?" parser from the official HN APIs.
• GitHub Repos, Trending & Releases API — repository facts, trending lists, releases and search, no token needed for small runs.
• Discourse Forum API — topics, posts and categories from any Discourse community via its own JSON endpoints, usernames only.

News, documents & the web

• Google News Search, Topics & Real Article URLs — news search and topic feeds with the publisher's real URL decoded.
• Website to Markdown — Content Extractor for LLMs & RAG — any site as clean Markdown, text and heading-aware chunks.
• WordPress Posts & Pages API — posts and pages from any WordPress site as clean text or Markdown, with categories, tags and images.
• Website Metadata API — any URL's meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter cards, hreflang, feeds, JSON-LD and microdata, with normalised Product, Article, Event and FAQ entities.
• Subdomain Finder API — every subdomain of a domain from certificate-transparency logs, resolved over DNS, with an optional live HTTP check.
• Internet Archive API — archive.org search, item metadata, files and reviews.
• Wayback Machine Toolkit — archived URL inventories, snapshots and text diffs between dates.
• Website Technology Detector — the tech stack behind any site, with the evidence for each detection.
• Domain Intelligence API — DNS, RDAP registration, TLS certificate and HTTP facts in one row per domain.
• SEO Page Audit — sitemap crawl with on-page checks, structured data and broken-link reports.
• Keyword Suggestions API — Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon and eBay autocomplete with alphabet and question expansions.
• Website Contact Extractor — emails, phone numbers and social profiles from any list of websites.
• Web Search Results API — Bing and DuckDuckGo organic results with snippets, no key, no browser.
• Company Enrichment API — a domain in, a company profile out: firmographics, contacts, tech stack, DNS and hiring signal.
• Company Dossier API — one company in, twelve sections out: profile, tech, contacts, DNS, open roles, news, SEC filings, federal awards, recalls, YC batch and apps.
• Press Releases API — GlobeNewswire and PR Newswire releases plus any newsroom feed, by keyword, company, ticker or subject.
• Federal Register API — rules, proposed rules, notices and the Public Inspection desk with dockets, comment deadlines and CFR references.
• Academic Papers Search API — OpenAlex, Crossref, arXiv and PubMed in one row per paper: abstract, citations, open-access PDF, authors and venue.
• RSS & Atom Feed Monitor — any RSS, Atom or JSON feed (or an OPML file) in, only the new items out, with keyword filters and a webhook.
• Website Change Monitor — watch any pages, diff the text between runs, get change rows with added/removed lines, keyword alerts and a webhook.
• Wikipedia & Wikidata API — article text, search, daily pageviews and Wikidata entity facts, any language edition.

Business, finance & jobs

• Congress & Insider Trades API — STOCK Act periodic transaction reports and SEC Form 4 insider trades in one schema.
• Federal Contracts, Grants & Lobbying API — SAM.gov opportunities, USAspending awards, Grants.gov notices and Senate lobbying filings in one schema.
• SEC EDGAR API — filings, XBRL financials and full-text search by ticker or CIK.
• Clinical Trials & FDA API — ClinicalTrials.gov studies plus openFDA recalls, labels, approvals, 510(k)s and adverse-event reports.
• Product & Vehicle Recalls API — CPSC, NHTSA, FDA and USDA recalls, vehicle complaints and ratings, plus a VIN decoder.
• Y Combinator Companies, Batches & Founders — the YC directory with founders and social links, filterable by batch, industry and hiring status.
• Career Site Jobs API — jobs straight from Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable and 10+ other ATS career sites.
• Workday Jobs API — every posting on any Workday career site, with facets, search, posted dates and full descriptions.
• New Job Postings Monitor — new, closed and changed postings on the career sites you watch.
• Hiring Signals API — Open Roles & Hiring Surge by Company — one row per company per run: open roles, what opened and closed, department and seniority breakdowns, and a hiring-surge flag.
• Remote Jobs API — RemoteOK, Remotive, We Work Remotely, Himalayas, Jobicy and more in one schema, deduplicated.
• Shopify Products API — any Shopify store's catalogue, variants, prices and stock signals.
• WooCommerce Products API — any WooCommerce store's catalogue, prices, variants and stock through its public Store API.
• Shopify App Store API — Shopify App Store listings by category, collection or developer: pricing plans, ratings and merchant reviews.
• Luma Events API — upcoming Luma events by city, category or calendar: dates, venue, price, capacity and organiser calendar, no host names.
• Shopify Store Monitor — price drops, sales, restocks, sell-outs and new products on any Shopify store, one row per change.
• Public Tenders API — EU TED, UK Find a Tender and Contracts Finder notices by keyword, CPV code, country, stage and deadline.
• Nonprofit & IRS 990 Lookup API — search US nonprofits and get EIN, NTEE code and multi-year Form 990 financials.
• OpenStreetMap Places API — businesses and points of interest by category and area from OpenStreetMap: name, address, coordinates, website, phone, opening hours.

Apps & games

• App Store & Google Play Reviews API — reviews from both stores with ratings, versions and developer replies.
• App Store Top Charts & App Search API — Apple top charts by country and genre, plus app search and details.
• App Store Keyword Rank Tracker — where any app ranks for any keyword on the App Store and Google Play, with rank changes and ASO suggestions.
• Steam Reviews API — Steam reviews with playtime, helpfulness and game details.
• Steam Game Data API — prices, tags, review scores, live player counts and top charts.
• App Store Monitor — App Store and Google Play listings watched between runs: new versions with release notes, price, rating and listing changes, one row per change.