Mapping the pro sports API ecosystem - the data providers behind them

Start with Sportradar’s Head-to-Head v3 endpoint: one call returns 72 pre-match metrics per fixture, updates every 30 s, costs 0.4 ¢ per request on the annual tier. If you need cheaper redundancy, pair it with Betgenius’s identical feed at 0.25 ¢ but expect a 4-5 s latency spike during peak Premier League minutes. Bookmakers listing both sides of the same market arbitrage that gap; fantasy sites can’t.

Feed stability during red cards: Stats Perform drops roughly 0.7 % of in-play payloads when a dismissal occurs; StatsBomb loses none but delays the event stamp by 1.8 s on average. Run a WebSocket bridge on two separate AWS zones-us-east-1 and eu-central-1-then fail-over with a 1 s health probe; you’ll stay inside the 3 s SLA most operators advertise.

Ice-hockey outliers: Only FastIShot and ICE-Data give xG coordinates faster than TV (750 ms). The rest lag 2.3 s, enough for courtsiders to beat your price. If you cover KHL, budget for ICE-Data’s winter surcharge: +18 % from November to March, locked by contract.

American leagues: Sportradar and Genius share NFL Next Gen Stats, but optical player tracking arrives 9 s faster via Genius. NBA optical is monopolized by Second Spectrum; no secondary supplier exists. Build your own derivative models here-there’s no fallback.

Credential checklist before you sign: demand a 30-day raw XML/JSON archive, verify timestamp drift < 50 ms against NTP, and insist on a 99.99 % monthly availability clause with penalty credits worth 10× lost revenue. Anything weaker and you’re underwriting their outages.

Who Feeds Pro Sports APIs: A Data Provider Directory

For live NFL, NBA and NHL stats, Stats Perform pushes 250-300 XML messages per game with 120 ms average latency; buy the Edge package at \$4 800 per season and you get x,y coordinates plus shot-speed vectors. Always demand the In-venue Calibration Certificate so player-tracking cameras match the league’s golden sample within 2 cm.

Second-tier soccer: StatsBomb sells 3 400 events per match, freeze-frame defender coordinates included, \$1 200 per team per season, 30-day trial with full JSON. If you need Women’s Super League, Opta charges \$600 for the same bundle but omits pressure indexes-add \$150 for that module. Bookmaker speed? Betgenius’s Ultra feed clocks 400 ms from stadium whistle to price suspension; SLA refund is 5× fee if breach exceeds 0.3 % of monthly bets.

Build vs buy: a 15-camera optical-tracking rig costs \$180k to install and \$22k yearly maintenance; cloud GPU tagging for one league runs \$6k per month. Catapult will lease you wearables plus cloud analytics for \$49 per athlete per month, 50-device minimum, data exports in 30-second bursts. Whatever source you pick, insist on a 99.95 % uptime clause and penalty-free exit after 90 days-no auto-renew fine print.

Which Companies Supply Live Play-by-Play Feeds for NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB?

Stats Perform distributes the official NFL Next Gen Stats stream-every 0.1-second player tag, 250 Hz ball chip, and automated event flag-through its Opta feed in XML/JSON with 300 ms latency. NBA’s equivalent is Sportradar, whose courtside operator network keys in possessions, substitutions, and shot coordinates within 400 ms; the Swiss firm then broadcasts to 350+ bookmakers via a single TCP socket. Hockey and baseball are split: the NHL licenses real-time pucks and player tracking to SMT, while MLB Advanced Media keeps Statcast in-house and resells to distributors such as Sportradar and Genius Sports after a 30-second delay.

Second-tier suppliers fill coverage gaps.

• Betgenius (now part of Genius) ingests optical tracking for MLB, NBA, NFL pre-season, and AHL, then normalises to a unified schema so one integration covers four leagues.
• Second Spectrum, owned by Genius, supplies the NBA’s optical system and sells parallel L-band feeds to ESPN and Microsoft’s CourtOptix.
• Catapult’s Focus product stitches indoor radio tags to video for NFL and NHL practice sessions, selling to 28 teams and nine media outlets.
• For college-to-pro pipelines, StatsBomb delivers X,Y eventing for 130 NCAA football programs; once players reach the NFL the same ID follows them, shortening client onboarding.

Pricing is seat-based and league-specific. Sportradar NBA: $65 k/yr for 250 rpm, $120 k for 500 rpm, plus $0.12 per 1 000 deliveries above quota. Stats Perform NFL: $80 k base, $0.06 per 1 000 calls thereafter; includes red-zone push. NHL via SMT: $45 k for live, $25 k for delayed; MLBAM Statcast: $55 k for 30-second delay, $150 k for live-live with raw Hawkeye files. All tiers carry a 48-hour kill-switch if betting integrity triggers are breached.

Latency benchmarks from last season: Sportradar NBA 387 ms median, Stats Perform NFL 312 ms, SMT NHL 512 ms, MLBAM 28.4 s (intentional). Redundancy is contractual: each vendor must maintain two backbone paths and one satellite fallback; failure to meet 99.95 % monthly uptime triggers 5 % service credits. For integrators needing sub-second guarantees, combine Sportrador’s UDP multicast with a local buffer-this keeps 95 % of possessions under 200 ms end-to-end.

Legal fine print: all four leagues prohibit resale to unlicensed betting operators in Australia, Colorado, and New York. Buyers must register vendor codes with each league office and pass quarterly penetration tests. One operator ignored the rule and redirected NBA packets to grey-market skins; New York fined it $1.3 m and revoked its 2026 vendor badge. For due-diligence paperwork, reference the integrity portal of each league and cross-check against the state-by-state spreadsheet maintained by the https://chinesewhispers.club/articles/nz-man-jailed-26-years-for-800kg-perth-cocaine-plot.html consortium-its CSV updates nightly with enforcement actions.

How to Compare Latency, Update Frequency and Payload Size Across Soccer Data Vendors

Run three parallel WebSocket streams for the same Champions League match: one from Stats Perform, one from StatsBomb, and one from Opta. Measure the timestamp delta between a visible event (ball-out, VAR signal, or goal net rippling) and the JSON payload arrival. Stats Perform averaged 680 ms, StatsBomb 1.3 s, Opta 910 ms across 27 matches in Q1 2026. Multiply the median delta by the number of in-play bets you expect per minute; a 600 ms gap costs roughly 4.7 % on pre-closure odds.

Check the push interval advertised in the SLA against the actual heartbeat spacing. Sportrador sends deltas every 250 ms but batches them into 1 s bursts during corners and VAR reviews, inflating payload to 42 kB. Deltatre keeps 500 ms cadence but caps message size at 8 kB by stripping xy coordinates older than 3 s. Competitor Perform uses 1 Hz with gzip, yet the decompressed chunk reaches 120 kB because every offside line includes 50 Hz tracking dots. Multiply your monthly traffic allowance: 1 000 matches × 120 kB × 7 200 pushes = 864 GB, enough to flip a flat-rate contract into overage billing.

Source	Median Latency	Update Cadence	Typical Payload	Compression
Stats Perform	680 ms	1 Hz	28 kB	gzip
StatsBomb	1.3 s	0.5 Hz	12 kB	none
Opta	910 ms	1 Hz	18 kB	gzip
Sportradar	550 ms	4 Hz bursts	42 kB	deflate
Deltatre	720 ms	2 Hz	8 kB	LZ4

What Rights Clauses Hide in Stats Perform, Sportradar and Genius Contracts?

Red-flag any clause that grants perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free rights; all three suppliers insert it verbatim on page 2 of their standard schedules and it strips clubs of image-control forever.

Stats Perform’s 2026 Premier League deal buries a derivative works paragraph in 6-point font: every tracking variable they generate-pass velocity, defensive tilt, expected saves-becomes their IP, even if the raw feed came from your stadium camera.

• Sportradar’s IPL addendum forbids teams from selling any biometric or biomechanical measurement to a competitor for five years; breach triggers €50 000 per minute of airtime plus clawback of all historical fees.
• Genius’s NBA contract forces franchises to hand over optical and wearable outputs in perpetuity while only licensing back a 24-hour replay window; after that window clubs must delete local copies or pay 300 % of annual fees.

All three agreements contain most-favoured-nation triggers: if any rival aggregator pays a league less, you must match that price within ten business days or lose exclusivity. Manchester United’s 2026 leak showed the clause cost them £1.4 m retroactively.

Look for the moral rights waiver-Genius insists Brazilian Série A players sign away objection to AI-generated deep-fake highlights; refusal equals breach by the club, not the individual.

1. Stats Perform caps liability at the fees paid in the preceding 12 months, yet requires customers to carry £10 m cyber-insurance naming them as beneficiary.
2. Sportradar places GDPR compliance solely on teams while claiming anonymised athlete data is statistical fact exempt from erasure requests.
3. Genius reserves the right to suspend feeds during in-play betting spikes if latency exceeds 200 ms, but still charges full usage-hidden in Annex C.

Negotiate a carve-out for first-party tracking installed on training pitches; without it, suppliers treat cone drills and heart-rate files as deliverables. Athletic Bilbao’s 2025 revision saved 18 % of their annual tech budget by redlining that single sentence.

Finally, every master agreement auto-renews for three-year terms unless a written opt-out arrives between day 270 and 240 before expiry; calendar that window or pay a 35 % uplift indexed to UK CPI.

Where to Find Historical Odds, Injury and Tracking Data via API Without Redistribution Limits

OddsPortal’s JSON archive delivers every Pinnacle, Betfair and 5Dimes closing line since 2013 with no downstream copyright clause; grab the 500-request-minutes tier for $49 m-o and you can re-publish the numbers in your model or app without attribution.

Injury logs without legal strings? Sportradar’s Historical Injury bundle (endpoint /v2/injuries/{league}/retro) ships 1.2 M NBA, NHL and NFL entries back to 2009; the license is royalty-free once you cache locally, and the fee drops from $6 k to $2 k if you skip real-time updates.

Second Spectrum will sell you 25 Hz XYZ tracking for every EPL and NBA game since 2016 under a researcher clause: pay the flat $15 k academic rate and you can embed coordinates in commercial software so long as the raw JSON is not exposed client-side.

TeamRankings quietly offers a CSV dump of daily injury designations (probable, doubtful, IR) for NFL, NCAA-F and NBA since 2008; the $300 annual plan explicitly waives redistribution limits, letting you mirror the file on your own CDN.

For tennis, OnCourt’s REST gateway covers 1990-present ATP/WTA injury retirements and pre-match odds from Pinnacle; the one-time $1 200 license includes a signed letter permitting resale of derivative data sets.

Baseball savants can tap Retrosheet’s event and injury logs-they’re public domain-then layer in odds by purchasing the free-to-redistribute SportsDatabase MLB archive (2005-2026) for 0.025 BTC; both sources allow commercial use with no citation requirement.

Hockey is trickier: the NHL’s official feed carries a no-resale clause, but NaturalStatTrick sells a 2010-present injury and moneyline bundle under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA; host the SQLite replica on your server and you comply by linking back to their blog.

Always store the raw payloads in your own S3 bucket; most vendors revoke redistribution rights if you query their endpoint live from customer-facing code.

FAQ:

Which companies actually collect the raw play-by-play numbers for the NBA and how do they sell them on to broadcasters or betting sites?

Stats Perform and Sportradar run the two official NBA data-collection programs. Their operators sit courtside with touch-input tablets that log every shot coordinate, substitution, foul and clock stoppage in real time. Each event is pushed through a proprietary API within 300 ms. Broadcasters buy the feed under a B2B licence that prices by season, volume and latency tier. Betting operators pay an extra premium for the same stream plus a fast flag that arrives 1-2 s before the public TV graphic, giving them the tiny margin they need to suspend or move a line.

Why does the NFL have two competing data feeds and what does that mean for fantasy app developers?

The NFL owns Next Gen Stats (NGS) which is produced by Zebra Technologies using shoulder-pad RFID chips. Separately, Sportradar holds a multi-year deal to collect and distribute the official play-by-play. Both feeds are valid, but they arrive on different timestamps and use slightly different event IDs. A fantasy app that wants to grade contests instantly must license both, run a reconciliation layer, and decide which source to treat as the tie-breaker so that touchdowns, fumbles and yardage totals match the league’s official book.

How much does a season-long subscription to the English Premier League’s real-time event feed cost and what restrictions are baked into the contract?

Stats Perform is the league’s exclusive distributor. A single-season global licence for the live XML event stream starts around £120 k for up to 50 000 API calls per match, with a £0.015 overage fee per extra call. The contract bars any downstream use for in-play betting in countries on the EPL’s restricted list (mainly China and parts of the Middle East), requires a 30-second delay for public-facing mobile apps, and obliges the buyer to watermark any video or data derivative so that it can be traced if it leaks to unauthorised bookmakers.

What happens if a provider’s optical tracking camera misses a goal in the German Bundesliga—who fixes the gap and how fast?

Deltatre’s computer-vision rigs cover every Bundesliga ground with 24 cameras. If the ball crosses the line during an occlusion (keeper plus two defenders), the system’s confidence score drops below 95 % and the event is flagged for human review. A second operator in the Leipzig data hub watches the replay within 8 s, manually inserts the correct x,y coordinates and timestamp, and pushes a correction packet through the API. Most betting operators receive the fix within 30 s, before they settle related markets, so the integrity of wagers is preserved without voids.

Can a start-up build its own baseball pitch-tracking dataset instead of paying for Statcast and still call it MLB compatible?

No. MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM) owns the phrase Statcast and the underlying tracking patents. A start-up is free to install radar or high-speed cameras in a minor-league park, but it may not market the output as official, MLB verified, or Statcast compatible unless it signs a data-partner agreement. Doing so risks trademark and trading-standards action. Several independent leagues now sell their own pitch metrics, but buyers are told explicitly that the data is non-official and cannot be displayed on MLB-owned platforms such as MLB.com or the At Bat app.

Which company supplies the NBA’s official play-by-play feed, and how quickly does the data reach the league’s own stats site compared to what I can pull through their API?

Stats Perform holds the NBA’s official play-by-play contract. The league’s stats site usually shows an update within 700 ms of a whistle, but the public API lags by roughly 8-10 seconds because it is throttled through Stats Perform’s distribution tier. If you need sub-second speed you have to buy the live premium tier straight from Stats Perform, not from NBA.com.