How to Get API-Sports Data Into Excel

The Problem with Getting API-Sports Data Into Excel

API-Sports covers more than 2,000 competitions — football, basketball, Formula 1, MMA, tennis — with real-time fixtures, standings, player stats, head-to-head records, odds, and injury reports. The data is there. Getting it into an Excel workbook in a usable form is the part that takes longer than it should.

Excel has no native REST API client. There is Power Query, which can hit an endpoint and return JSON, but navigating a deeply nested API-Sports response through Power Query's M formula language is not a fast afternoon's work. And once you have one query configured, you need a separate query for each endpoint, each league, each season. The maintenance burden compounds quickly.

Below are the four ways analysts and developers typically pull API-Sports data into Excel. Only the last one handles the full analytical chain.

Method 1: Call the API Directly and Paste the Results

The default. You use a tool like Postman, a browser extension, or a small Python script to hit the API-Sports endpoint, read the JSON, flatten the fields you need, and paste them into the workbook.

When this works:

• You are comfortable writing scripts or reading JSON by hand
• It is a one-off pull for a specific league or season
• The data set is small enough to paste without a tool

When it breaks:

• You need to pull data for 50 fixture IDs in one batch
• The workbook structure changes and your paste logic no longer lines up
• A colleague needs to repeat the pull and has never touched the API
• The same data needs refreshing at the start of every gameweek

Every pull is manual labor. There is no memory of which fields you pulled last time, no consistent column order, and no link between the API response shape and the table your model expects. The first pull takes an hour. The fifteenth pull takes the same hour.

Method 2: Use Power Automate to Trigger API-Sports Calls From Excel

The next step up is Power Automate. If your Excel file lives on OneDrive or SharePoint, you can build a flow that watches the workbook for changes, calls API-Sports when a new row appears, and writes the result back.

This works for event-driven moments:

• New fixture ID added → fetch that match result
• New team ID entered → pull season statistics for that team
• New player ID added → fetch career trophy history

This fails for batch or analytical work:

• Pulling all 380 fixtures for a Premier League season in one run
• Merging top scorers and assist-makers from two separate endpoints
• Building a head-to-head comparison table across ten years of matches
• Recalculating fantasy points across all players from a full gameweek

Power Automate flows fire row by row. They do not aggregate, they do not merge two API responses, and they do not handle the conditional logic of skipping rows where the match has not yet been played. You also pay per run, and the cost climbs fast once you are pulling stats for a full squad.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — API Connector Add-Ins for Excel

Until recently, the most repeatable option for pulling sports API data into Excel was a category of connector add-ins that let you configure an endpoint, map JSON fields to columns, and save the configuration for later. You picked the endpoint, set the parameters, mapped the response paths, and ran the import.

That was a real step up from paste-and-pray. Once you mapped the fixture list endpoint to your column structure, you could re-run it at the start of each round without rebuilding anything.

But you were still responsible for the endpoint configuration, the JSON path expressions for nested player stats objects, the separate configuration for each data type you needed, and the update process every time the season year or league ID changed. The add-in got the data in, but the thinking about what to pull and how to combine it was still on you. And when you needed data from two endpoints merged into one table, you were back to doing it by hand.

This is the category we think of as the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook, on both Excel for the web and Excel desktop. It reads the workbook, understands what you are building, and through its built-in API-Sports integration it can pull fixtures, standings, player stats, head-to-head records, odds, or injury reports and write them directly into the workbook. No Power Query setup, no JSON path mapping, no endpoint configuration, you just ask.

Example 1: Your Workbook Already Has the IDs

You have an Excel workbook with team IDs in column A and you want season statistics for each team.

Fetch season statistics for each team ID in column A from API-Sports (Premier League, season 2024) and write team name, goals scored, goals conceded, clean sheets, and average possession into columns B through F.

SheetXAI calls the API-Sports teams/statistics endpoint for each ID, flattens the response, and writes the stats into the workbook. If a team ID returns no data for that season, it flags the row so you know which IDs need checking.

Example 2: You Want the Data and the Analysis Together

You do not have IDs yet and you want SheetXAI to fetch the full data set and then do something analytical with it.

Pull all 2023 Formula 1 race results — race name, driver, constructor, finishing position, points — and write them into this workbook with one row per driver per race. Then add a tab called 'Driver Standings' with the final championship standings: driver name, nationality, team, and total points.

SheetXAI fetches the race results endpoint and the driver standings endpoint, writes the results into the main tab, creates the Driver Standings tab, and populates both. One prompt, two API calls, two structured tabs, without you writing a single Power Query formula.

Which Method Should You Use

For a single one-off pull where you know the exact endpoint and just need the raw data, calling the API directly and pasting it works fine. For event-driven workflows where a new row should trigger a new fetch, Power Automate is a reasonable fit.

For anything that involves fetching across a list of IDs, merging data from two endpoints, building analytical tables, or refreshing the same data on a schedule, SheetXAI is the only option that handles the full stack — data pull, JSON flattening, column mapping, and analysis — in a single prompt from inside Excel.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull fixture data or player stats from API-Sports directly into an Excel workbook you have open. The API-Sports integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.

For specific workflows, see how to export a full F1 season race results table in Excel, how to build a team stats comparison table in Excel, or browse the full integrations directory.