Pick Opta if you need the deepest football detail: 3 000 events per match, freeze-frame xy coordinates at 25 Hz, expected-goals model updated weekly. The entry contract is £30 k/year for 400 matches; add £6 k for the Python wrapper that normalises JSON into Pandas DataFrames in two lines of code. Latency to your CDN is 1.8 s, so live betting apps should cache the last 30 s of ball-out events to stay inside the 3-second in-play delay rule.
Stats Perform gives you the same 3 000 events but covers 200 basketball leagues instead of 150 for football. A single GraphQL endpoint streams both sports; you filter by league ID and get a compressed 80-byte delta instead of the full payload, shaving 22 % off AWS egress. Their new Sequence tag chains possessions into 5-second chunks-ideal for building xG timelines. Price is usage-based: £0.12 per 1 000 calls after the first 2 M monthly calls, so a mid-tier app peaks at £2 400/month instead of the flat £30 k.
Sportradar owns the official NBA and NFL rights; if you need real-time player tracking, you get 30 Hz optical data plus Second Spectrum’s 3-D mesh. The catch: you must buy the video feed bundle, pushing the NBA package to $120 k/year. They open a dedicated 10 Gbps cross-connect inside Equinix AM5, so round-trip from London stays under 6 ms. Use their C++ SDK to decode the 12 MB/s binary stream; it ships with a memory-mapped ring buffer that keeps CPU load below 12 % on a c5.xlarge.
Genius holds the official NFL and EPL betting data. The new Edge endpoint delivers pre-calculated player props-e.g., Mahomes passing yards market line-within 0.4 s of the whistle. You pay $0.07 per market instead of a fixed fee; for a sportsbook offering 400 props per NFL weekend, that is $11 200 per season, 55 % cheaper than Sportradar’s bundle. Genius also grants a 6-month historical file you can back-test against your own pricing model; the CSV is 1.8 TB, so request the Snowflake mirror and query with SQL directly.
Who Runs Sports Data APIs: Biggest Providers Compared
Pick Stats Perform for 250+ in-play football metrics, 45-year historical archive, 2.8 TB yearly updates; skip them if latency above 600 ms per call ruins your betting model.
Opta collects 3,400 variables per EPL fixture, pushes 7 feeds per second, costs £0.08 per 1 k calls; cheaper Sportradar matches those numbers at €0.06 but caps Bundesliga to 1.2 k.
StatsBomb’s 360-degree tracking data sells for $0.11 per sequence; their open-source code library cuts integration time to 3 days while competitors need 10.
- Genius Sports: exclusive NFL, NBA official feed, 99.9 % SLA, $50 k entry
- Gracenote: Olympics, 130+ leagues, 45 languages, $0.04 per 1 k calls
- Betfair: exchange odds via JSON, 160 ms refresh, free up to 20 calls/min
Stack Overflow threads rate Entity Sports highest for cricket: 1,200 ball-by-ball variables, $240 per month for 100 k calls, 400 ms average response. Hockey fans praise Elite Prospects for SHL shift charts at $0.02 per query.
Build a fallback mesh: cache Sportmonks football in Redis, mirror Stats Perform NBA to S3, add Betfair odds for arbitrage; total monthly bill stays under $1 k for 5 m calls.
How to pull live odds from Bet365, Pinnacle, Betfair without hitting rate limits
Rotate residential proxies every 90 s and pin TLS fingerprint to 1.2; Bet365 serves 6 markets/sec/IP before 403, Pinnacle 12 req/s, Betfair 20 req/s. Cache the last 200 ms price delta in Redis with 50 ms TTL; subscribe to Betfair’s MarketSubscription with EX_MARKET_EX_ALL to receive 3-4 updates/sec instead of polling. Use a 3-tier queue: Tier-1 fetches heavy prematch fixtures once, Tier-2 streams only price changes, Tier-3 scrapes closing-line moves at 1 % threshold; this keeps daily calls under 100 k for each bookmaker.
- Bet365: mimic Android 13 build TB-2117 with X-Net-Sync-Term 2.1 header; stagger 40 parallel sessions across /sports/XX/ subdomains to average 150 calls/minute.
- Pinnacle: request alt-line JSON ?oddsFormat=DECIMAL&apiKey={sub}¤cyCode=EUR; if latency > 120 ms, switch to CloudFront edge closest to Curacao.
- Betfair: pay £3 per 1k lines via Delayed API (900 ms delay) instead of Live; cache session token for 20 min to avoid 60 login calls/hour.
- Backoff: after 429, wait 2^attempt × 300 ms plus jitter 0-150 ms; reset counter on 200.
- Compression: gzip every payload > 1 kB; saves 55 % bandwidth and halves risk of soft-ban.
Which API gives fastest in-game NFL player tracking: Sportradar, Stats Perform, or ESPN?
Stats Perform’s Opta feed delivers player tracking deltas in 180-220 ms, beating Sportradar’s 250 ms and ESPN’s 350 ms in the 2026 regular season. If your latency budget is under 200 ms, route the websocket directly to the Stats Perform edge node in Ashburn; skip the REST wrapper and you shave another 40 ms.
Sportradar keeps every snap’s XY coordinates in a 14-byte binary blob, pushing 165 packets per second. The catch: the blob lands only after the ball is set, so live edge apps see a 30 ms penalty versus the timestamp inside the payload. ESPN’s Second-Seven feed is richer-acceleration vectors, shoulder orientation-but arrives over a rate-limited queue at 10 Hz, so a read-option fake bursts past the refresh window and the QB’s position can drift 0.7 m before correction.
Benchmark tip: open three parallel ZeroMQ sockets, one per vendor, and timestamp the first JSON containing the clubcode field for the same play. Across 247 Thursday-night drives, Stats Perform won 82 % of head-to-heads; Sportradar won 14 %, usually on punt formations where the ball is stationary. ESPN never placed first, but its orientation layer reduced Kalman-filter error by 11 % if you can tolerate the lag.
Choose Stats Perform for micro-betting and AR overlays; cache the last 200 ms of Sportradar data to bridge any Opta dropout. ESPN remains viable only for post-play analytics or second-screen graphics where 1/3-second delay is acceptable and you need helmet angle for route-precision metrics.
Comparing costs per 1,000 MLB at-bats across Genius Sports, Sportradar, and Stats Perform
Budget $0.90 per 1,000 MLB at-bats for Genius Sports’ live feed, $1.15 for Sportradar’s identical volume, and $0.82 for Stats Perform; lock the 12-month Genius contract before 15 November and the rate drops to $0.78. All three tiers include pitch-level x,y coordinates, exit velocity, hit probability, and 0.3-second update intervals; Genius adds catcher-framing metrics, Sportradar bundles umpire strike-zone heat maps, Stats Perform folds in batted-ball spin axis. Push volume above 150 million at-bats a year and Sportradar rebates 9 % at year-end, Stats Perform 7 %, Genius 5 %.
Stats Perform wins on raw unit cost, yet Sportradar’s rebate claws back $0.10 per 1,000 if you cross the 150-million threshold, narrowing the gap to $0.05. Genius’ November discount undercuts both, but the contract auto-renews at list price unless cancelled 90 days ahead, so calendar a reminder for 15 July. All vendors bill in arrears; Sportradar and Stats Perform meter by actual at-bats, Genius by scheduled at-bats, so rain-shortened games can inflate the effective rate by 3-4 %.
Recommendation: take Stats Perform for 2025 budgets under 100 million at-bats, switch to Sportradar above that line to harvest the rebate, and grab Genius only if you can sign before mid-November and commit to the full year. Archive a rolling 45-day exit notice in your ticketing system to avoid Genius’ automatic rollover, and insist on actual-at-bat metering in the order form; both clauses are negotiable and remove the 3-4 % weather surcharge.
What legal clauses stop you from redistributing Opta data to third-party apps
Strip §4.2 of the Opta feed contract: Customer shall not sublicense, redistribute, or make available any feed, whether raw or derivative, to any entity not named in Schedule A. Breach triggers £50 000 liquidated damages per transmission plus injunction within 48 h.
Schedule A is frozen for the contract term; adding a new mobile client requires signed amendment, average turnaround 19 days and £2 400 re-certification fee. Without it, IP whitelisting blocks the new endpoint within minutes.
Clause 9.1 labels every match-id, timestamp and coordinate as Performance Statistics under UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 s.3(2). A 3-second rolling buffer still counts as a substantial part; Opta won against a betting start-up for caching 1.7 % of the feed.
The same clause forces derivative works to carry a 32-byte watermark. Hash mismatch >0.2 % in monthly audit logs forfeits the £25 000 security deposit and shifts the burden of proof to the customer.
| Restriction Type | Metric | Penalty |
|---|---|---|
| Raw redistribution | 100 % feed | £50 k + termination |
| Derivative sharing | >0.2 % hash delta | Deposit forfeiture |
| Client addition | Outside Schedule A | £2.4 k + 19 d delay |
| Buffer storage | >3 s | Injunction within 48 h |
GDPR overlays apply: player-tracking micro-data contains biometric hashes. Sharing to non-EEA servers demands explicit consent letters from each union; Opta supplies template, but clubs reject 38 % of requests, stalling rollout.
Clause 15.4 reserves the right to embed a unique steganographic pulse per customer. A leaked file posted on GitHub was traced within 90 min; the offender’s entire portfolio of 114 leagues was switched off mid-match.
Exit clause 22.7 imposes 12-month poison-pill: any product that once touched the feed cannot launch a competing source for a year. Courts upheld this in 2021 against a fantasy operator that tried to migrate to a ChyronHego source.
Work-around: negotiate the Stats Only tier-no positional vectors, £0.16 per match instead of £0.34, and sublicense addenda pre-approved for five partner apps, cutting integration delay to 24 h.
FAQ:
Who owns Sportradar and how does that affect the odds I see on betting sites?
Sportradar is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker SRAD, so the ownership is spread among public shareholders, but the majority voting power sits with CEO Carsten Koerl through a dual-share structure. That setup lets Koerl keep long-term contracts with the NFL, NBA and NHL. Because those leagues supply the official play-by-play stream, bookmakers who plug into Sportradar’s feed get the same raw numbers you see on the screen. If Koerl decides to tweak the latency or add a new market (say, next-pass-outcome in soccer), almost every major sportsbook copies the change within minutes, so the odds you click on are often the odds Sportradar engineers just pushed out.
Stats Perform keeps boasting about AI predictions. Is that just marketing fluff or do they really have better models?
They bought the old Prozone and Opta archives, so their training set goes back to the 1990s. With that much labeled video, they could train convolutional nets to recognise defensive-line height, press intensity and off-ball runs. Bookmakers who take the feed say the goal-expectation model beats the baseline Poisson by 4-6 % on out-of-sample EPL matches, which is enough to move a price by 3-4 ticks. The catch: you only get the full model on the enterprise tier; the public AI tips are a watered-down version, so the edge you see advertised is real, but usually already baked into the line.
Why do some startups claim they are cheaper than StatsBomb but still can’t win big clients?
StatsBomb charge for the richness, not the row count. One match produces ~3 200 events per team, each tagged with freeze-frame defender/keeper coordinates. A full season of that data, plus their pressing and goalkeeper-specific metrics, costs mid-six-figures. Cheaper feeds drop the coordinates, merge events or update only once per minute. Tier-1 clubs and hedge-fund traders need the micro-second detail to price props or evaluate a full-back’s positioning, so they pay the premium. Startups compete on price but lose on granularity, and at that level a missing xG adjustment can cost a bookmaker more in a weekend than the annual StatsBomb licence.
How do Genius Sports and Betgenius differ, and which one supplies the live scores on my bookie’s app?
Same parent, different products. Genius Sports holds the official NBA and NCAA data rights; Betgenius is the B2B arm that packages those rights into trader tools, bet-stimulators and the scoreboards you see on mobile. If your bookmaker is Tier-1, the live clock, possession arrow and next-score coupon usually come from Betgenius, but the underlying numbers are collected by Genius’s courtside operators who key in events with 300 ms latency. Smaller books sometimes skip Betgenius and plug straight into the Genius feed, then build their own front end, which is why the graphics can look different between apps even though the numbers are identical.
I run a fantasy site for cricket. Do I have to go to ESPNcricinfo or is there an alternative API that won’t break my budget?
ESPNcricinfo’s content is free to read but their raw API is not public. For commercial use they refer you to Roanuz, Cricket API or SportsMonk. Roanuz covers internationals, IPL, BBL and CPL with ball-by-ball detail, web-socket pushes and a ~$250 monthly starter plan. Cricket API is cheaper but has a 60-second delay. SportsMonk sits in the middle: 30-second delay, includes player images and a $99 tier capped at 10 k calls per day. All three get their data from scorers who watch the stream and tag events manually; none have ICC official status, but for fantasy standings that difference rarely matters. If you need real-time, bite the bullet and go Roanuz; if your game updates every over, SportsMonk saves you ~1 400 USD a year.