Let us start with the uncomfortable sentence, because you will find it out anyway: Dribble has no odds dataset. No pre-match odds, no in-play odds, no odds movement history. If odds are the raw material of your workflow, FootyStats is probably your answer, and the rest of this article is about the specific case where it is not.
We build Dribble. This comparison is written for the betting and analysis crowd FootyStats serves, and it concedes every round FootyStats genuinely wins.
Who each is for
FootyStats is a soccer stats API built around the questions bettors actually ask: over/under lines, both teams to score (BTTS), corners, cards, goals, form, and standings, plus pre-match odds and predictions. It covers an enormous number of leagues (up to 1,500+ on the top plan), serves live scores and live stats, and prices in generous hourly request quotas. If you run a tips site, a betting affiliate, a live-score product with betting context, or you build models directly on market-adjacent stats, it is purpose-built for you.
Dribble is built around a different question: how good was each chance, really? Our data is sourced from Opta and centers on expected goals (xG) and event data, per player per match, across full seasons, with a BigQuery warehouse for heavy analysis. It is post-match data on a daily refresh, not a live feed, and again: no odds. Dribble is for analysts and modelers who want to build their own ratings from underlying performance data rather than consuming market-derived stats.
Pricing comparison
| FootyStats | Dribble | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | Hobby £29.99/mo, 50 leagues, 1,800 requests/hour | API Lite $19/mo, 1,000 calls/day (personal and research use) |
| Mid | Serious £69.99/mo, 150 leagues, 3,600 requests/hour | API Elite $49/mo, 5,000 calls/day, commercial licence |
| Top | Everything £389.99/mo, 1,500+ leagues, 4,500 requests/hour | API Flite $149/mo, 50,000 calls/day, white-label licence |
| Free tier | None advertised on their pricing page | None (3-day trial API keys) |
| Analysis warehouse | Not offered (REST only) | BigQuery: Starter $49/mo personal/academic, Pro $149/mo commercial, Max $499/mo |
Two things stand out. First, FootyStats quotas are hourly and generous: 1,800 requests an hour on the entry plan is a lot of polling headroom for live products. Dribble quotas are daily and smaller, because the product is not designed for polling; it is designed for pulling analytical datasets. Second, FootyStats bills in GBP and Dribble in USD, so convert before comparing: at typical rates, FootyStats Hobby lands around $38 to $40 a month, roughly double Dribble's $19 entry (though the licences and quotas differ enough that the comparison is apples to oranges).
Data comparison
Betting-market stats. FootyStats ships the full vocabulary of the betting world: over/under, BTTS, corners, cards, goals, plus pre-match odds and predictions, across up to 1,500+ leagues. Dribble offers none of this. If your product displays odds or your model trains on market data, FootyStats wins outright.
Live data. FootyStats provides livescores and live stats. Dribble is post-match on a daily refresh (API Elite) or 72-hour refresh (API Lite), and our own documentation states it is not a live or real-time feed. For anything in-play, FootyStats wins.
Expected goals. This is the one category where the ranking reverses completely. Dribble's core is Opta-sourced xG: per-player per-match expected goals, pre-shot xG mapped across all seasons, shot zones, through balls, fast breaks, and (on BigQuery) more than 57 million event rows with Opta XY coordinates. FootyStats advertises no xG product in its published feature lists; its stats vocabulary is the conventional betting one. If your edge comes from modeling chance quality rather than consuming market stats, Dribble is the only one of the two that gives you the input.
League breadth. FootyStats covers up to 1,500+ leagues on its top plan, which is extraordinary for lower-league and obscure-competition coverage. Dribble covers 31 competitions: the top 5 European leagues, UEFA competitions, Saudi Pro League, MLS, Belgium, Turkey, Portugal, and others. For mainstream leagues both are fine; beyond that, FootyStats wins.
Modeling workflow. Dribble's BigQuery plans exist specifically for modelers: the full dataset as queryable tables, weekly refresh on Pro (landing 24 to 48 hours post-whistle), daily snapshots and revision history on Max. A season-to-season xG persistence study, the standard test of whether a rating measures skill or luck, is an afternoon of SQL. FootyStats is REST only, so you build your own warehouse. For research-style modeling, Dribble wins.
Licensing for commercial products. Both allow commercial use on paid plans, but read the fine print. On Dribble, commercial plans (API Elite and up, BigQuery Pro and up) permit derived products: apps, dashboards, models, published research. Raw-data redistribution is never included by default and needs a separately signed addendum. If you plan to resell raw data feeds rather than products built on them, talk to us first.
The honest use case for Dribble in a betting workflow
Here is the specific analyst for whom Dribble beats FootyStats: you build your own xG-based team and player ratings, and you compare them against market odds to find mispricings. Dribble gives you the Opta xG inputs; you source odds elsewhere (there are free closing-odds CSVs, for example from football-data.co.uk, which publishes Pinnacle closing lines). Your edge lives in the gap between your ratings and the market, and that gap is only measurable if your ratings come from data the market has not already fully absorbed.
If instead you want odds, betting stats, and predictions served to you ready-made, that analyst is not you, and FootyStats is the better buy. No hard feelings; we would rather you learn it here.
Verdict: a clear recommendation split
Choose FootyStats if: odds and betting-market stats are core to your product, you need live scores or live stats, you cover obscure leagues, or you want predictions out of the box. For the betting crowd, it is the more complete product.
Choose Dribble if: you model with expected goals, you want Opta-sourced event data without an enterprise Opta contract (commonly cited at $100k or more per year), you do academic or published research, or you want a queryable warehouse for backtesting rather than paginating REST endpoints.
The two are complements more than substitutes: FootyStats for the market layer, Dribble for the performance layer underneath it. Analysts who take modeling seriously often end up needing both.
Dribble starts at $19 a month for personal and research use, with commercial licences from $49 a month and BigQuery plans for heavy modeling. Compare plans and start a 3-day trial at dribble360.com/pricing.