If you are building anything with football data, you have already found API-Football. It is the default choice for thousands of developers, and for good reason. We build Dribble, so we have a bias, but this article is written to be genuinely useful even if you conclude API-Football is the right call for you. The two products solve different problems, and picking wrong costs you a migration later.
Who each is for
API-Football is for builders who need breadth and immediacy. A live-score app, a fixtures widget, a fantasy tool, a bot that posts lineups an hour before kickoff. One API gives you fixtures, live incidents, standings, transfers, injuries, pre-match and in-play odds, and predictions across more than a thousand competitions. If your product reacts to things happening right now, start here.
Dribble is for builders who need analytical depth. Expected goals (xG) and event data sourced from Opta, per-player and per-team aggregates across full seasons, and a BigQuery warehouse for serious modeling work. Our data is post-match on a daily refresh, explicitly not a live feed. If you need live scores, Dribble is the wrong tool, and we would rather tell you that in this paragraph than after you subscribe.
Pricing comparison
| API-Football | Dribble | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | $0, 100 requests/day, all endpoints, limited historical seasons | None (3-day trial API keys available) |
| Entry paid | Pro $19/mo, 7,500 requests/day | API Lite $19/mo, 1,000 calls/day (personal and research use) |
| Mid tier | Ultra $29/mo, 75,000 requests/day | API Elite $49/mo, 5,000 calls/day, commercial licence |
| Top tier | Mega $39/mo, 150,000 requests/day | API Flite $149/mo, 50,000 calls/day, white-label licence |
A few honest observations. First, API-Football gives you far more requests per dollar. If your architecture polls live endpoints every 30 seconds, that difference decides your bill, and API-Football wins on pure quota economics. Second, the entry price is identical at $19 a month, but the licences differ: API-Football's Pro covers all competitions and endpoints, while Dribble's Lite is a personal and research licence (commercial use starts at Elite, $49 a month). Third, Dribble has no free tier, only 3-day trial keys, while API-Football's free 100 requests a day is genuinely enough to evaluate a schema before spending anything.
Why does Dribble cost more per call? Because the underlying data does. Our feed is sourced from Opta under licence, and Opta-grade data is famously expensive: enterprise Opta deals are commonly cited at $100k or more per year. You are paying a fraction of that for a slice of the same pedigree, not for raw request volume.
Data comparison
Coverage breadth. API-Football lists 1,244 leagues and cups on its coverage page, with per-competition detail on whether events, lineups, statistics, predictions, or odds are available. Dribble covers 31 competitions across 6 seasons: the top 5 European leagues, the three UEFA competitions, the Saudi Pro League, MLS, Belgium, Turkey, and Portugal, among others. If you need the Norwegian second division or the J-League, this is not close. API-Football wins.
Live data. API-Football delivers live scores with updates around every 15 seconds, plus live in-play odds. Dribble is a post-match product on a daily refresh (API Elite) or 72-hour refresh (API Lite), and our own FAQ states plainly that it is not a live or real-time Opta feed. Building a live-score app on Dribble would be a mistake. API-Football wins.
Expected goals and event depth. This is where the comparison flips. Dribble ships Opta-sourced xG per player per match, pre-shot xG mapped across all seasons, and (on BigQuery) more than 57 million event rows with Opta XY coordinates: shot zones, through balls, fast breaks, forward-zone passes, and more. API-Football has no advertised xG product in its documented endpoint set; its statistics endpoints cover conventional match stats. If your work starts with the question "how good was that chance, really," Dribble wins by a distance.
Odds. API-Football includes pre-match and in-play odds endpoints (with 7-day retention). Dribble has no odds dataset at all, a deliberate scope decision. If odds are core to your product, API-Football wins and it is not close.
Predictions. API-Football ships a predictions endpoint. Dribble does not do predictions for you; the product thesis is that you build your own models on top of the xG data. Pick your philosophy.
Analysis warehouse. Dribble offers the full dataset in BigQuery: Starter at $49 a month for personal and academic use, Pro at $149 a month with a commercial licence, Max at $499 a month with daily snapshots and revision history. You can run a season-to-season xG persistence study in SQL in an afternoon. API-Football is REST polling only, which means you build and maintain your own warehouse. For research and modeling, Dribble wins.
A Dribble call, for comparison
import requests
headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer drb_your_key_here"}
resp = requests.get(
"https://dribble360.com/api/v1/player_matches",
headers=headers,
params={"season": "2025/2026", "team": "Arsenal"},
)
resp.raise_for_status()
for row in resp.json()["response"][:5]:
# field names per the schema docs; season is a required parameter
print(row["player"], row["expected_goals"], row["shots"])
The API is REST with JSON and CSV output, Bearer token auth, rate limits returned in headers, and quotas resetting at midnight UTC. Trial keys last 3 days, long enough to validate the schema against your use case.
Verdict: a clear recommendation split
Choose API-Football if: you need live scores, you need broad league coverage beyond the top competitions, odds or predictions are part of your product, or you want a free tier to prototype against. It is the better general-purpose football API, full stop.
Choose Dribble if: your work centers on expected goals, scouting analytics, or statistical modeling; you want Opta-sourced event data without an enterprise Opta contract; or you do research and want a queryable warehouse instead of paginating through REST endpoints for a week.
Many serious projects end up using both: API-Football for the live layer (scores, lineups, odds) and Dribble for the analytical layer (xG, events, models). That is a legitimate architecture, and we will happily be the second half of it.
Dribble starts at $19 a month for personal and research use, with commercial licences from $49 a month. Compare plans and start a 3-day trial at dribble360.com/pricing.