Introduction to the Course

Learn about Api-Football, the services it offers, and how we'll move forward with this course.

We'll cover the following

Football has a massive global following with rising demand for platforms that can keep fans up-to-date with everything in the football world. We, as developers, can meet this demand by creating applications and websites to track football statistics. That’s where Api-Football comes into play.

What is an API?

Before we go into Api-Football, let's understand what an API is. An API is a software gateway that allows different software components to communicate with each other. APIs help expose the capabilities of applications to the outer world, allowing for programmatic access to their data.

Consider the case of a service like a football app that provides us access to football stats and information. Building and exposing an API for this service will allow others to programmatically fetch the data this service offers, such as the list of fixtures or league statistics.

Many popular services like YouTube, Reddit, and Google Maps also provide APIs for extended use cases. These services allow authorized clients to access the resources provided by them.

Api-Football Overview

Api-Football is a great resource for any football application. It provides statistics for over 880 football leagues and cups. All we have to do is integrate its endpoints with our app, and our users will have access to all the data they need.

The football API offers two types of services:

  1. It allows us to invoke endpoints from our application to get the required data in JSON format.

  2. It allows us to embed widgets in our application to get the required data in HTML format.

We’ll look at both of these services in this course.

To get the most out of this course, you should be familiar with the following:

  • Basic understanding of the REST API architecture.
  • The use of HTTP requests and familiarity with JSON objects. We’ll utilize HTTP requests to make many API calls, and the returned data will be in JSON format.
  • The basics of JavaScript language and React framework.