The Footballer, Referee & Club APIs

Our football APIs have always answered “what happened in this competition?” Now they also answer “who?” Three new Zafronix football data APIs go across competitions rather than inside one: the Footballer API (a player’s whole career), the Referee API (a match official’s analytics), and the Club API (a club’s full trophy cabinet). Same key, same JSON shape, same free tier — one canonical id per person and club, joinable to your own data.

Competition APIs answer “what”. These answer “who”.

Our competition APIs are organized by tournament — the World Cup API knows the World Cup, the Champions League API knows the Champions League. That’s perfect until your question crosses competitions: What has Lionel Messi done across every competition? Which referee has officiated the most finals? How many trophies has Real Madrid won, everywhere?

The three new entity APIs answer exactly those. Each one owns a single kind of thing — a footballer, a referee, a club — deduplicated into one canonical id and enriched with a cross-competition summary you’d otherwise have to assemble yourself from a dozen endpoints.

The Footballer API: a player’s whole career in one call

The Footballer API holds 29,000+ players, each a single canonical record no matter how many tournaments they appear in. Ask for a player’s /career and you get a pre-computed digest — total appearances and goals, seasons spanned, competitions and clubs played, and a per-competition breakdown:

curl -H "X-API-Key: $ZAFRONIX_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.zafronix.com/football/players/v1/players/lionel-messi-1987/career"

There’s a cross-competition scorers /leaderboard and a milestone /records endpoint too — most goals, most appearances, longest career span — so “who has scored the most across every competition we cover” is a single request, not a batch job.

The Referee API: analytics for match officials

Referees are the most under-served entity in public football data, so the Referee API leans in. 3,800+ officials, each with an /analytics block: matches officiated, a home/draw/away result profile, goals per game, matches by stage, finals and big-match appointments, and years active.

curl -H "X-API-Key: $ZAFRONIX_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.zafronix.com/football/referees/v1/referees/michael-oliver/analytics"

A /leaderboard?by=finals ranks officials by the biggest appointments of their careers. (One honest caveat, stated in the response itself: we don’t infer cards-per-game — card events aren’t in our source data, so we don’t pretend to have them.)

The Club API: the full trophy cabinet

The Club API resolves 3,000+ clubs — every spelling variant (“Inter”, “Internazionale”, “Inter Milan”) folds into one record — and gives each a cross-competition /honours list: every title across the 24 club competitions we cover, with counts and the years won.

curl -H "X-API-Key: $ZAFRONIX_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.zafronix.com/football/clubs/v1/clubs/real-madrid/honours"

There’s a most-decorated /clubs/honours leaderboard for the “who has won the most” question that every football argument eventually reaches.

One id, joinable to your own data

The quiet superpower is the identity layer. Every player, referee, and club carries an externalIds block — its Wikidata QID plus FBref and Transfermarkt ids — and every API exposes a reverse lookup:

curl -H "X-API-Key: $ZAFRONIX_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.zafronix.com/football/players/v1/players/resolve?externalId=wikidata:Q615"

So you can hand us an id you already have and get back the canonical Zafronix record — the join that lets our careers, analytics, and honours sit next to your own tables without a fuzzy name-match step.

Ask in plain English

If you’d rather not learn the endpoints, our new /ask endpoint takes a question and routes it — using a local language model that only routes, never invents numbers — to the right cross-competition capability, then answers from the data:

curl -H "X-API-Key: $ZAFRONIX_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.zafronix.com/ask?q=Who has won more, Real Madrid or Barcelona%3F"

One key, one shape, free tier

All three ship on the family contract: the same API key you already use on any Zafronix football API works here with no extra step, the JSON shape matches, and the free tier needs no card. Explore every endpoint live in the API playground, read the full reference in the docs, or browse the Footballer, Referee, and Club API pages.

api.zafronix.com is live with the free tier and paid plans. Enterprise inquiries: contact form.