The Scenario
You are a fantasy football analyst. It is Tuesday evening and you want to start building a fixture-difficulty rating model for the rest of the Premier League season. You need the full 2024/25 fixture list — all 380 matches — with kickoff dates, home and away teams, and venue. You also need the current standings so you can weight each fixture by the opponent's position.
The bad version:
- You try to hit the API-Sports endpoint from Power Query using a web connector
- The nested JSON response breaks Power Query's auto-detection — you have to write M formulas to navigate three levels of nesting
- You get the fixture list out after 40 minutes of formula debugging
- You realise you need a separate Power Query query for the standings endpoint
- You try to merge the two queries in Power Query and the join key is inconsistent between the two responses
- You have spent three hours on data prep in Power Query before your model workbook is even open.
The faster version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that calls API-Sports directly, so you never write a Power Query formula.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull all 2024/25 Premier League fixtures with date, home team, away team, and venue into this workbook, one row per match. Then get the current Premier League standings — team, played, won, drawn, lost, goals for, goals against, and points — and paste them starting in column H.
SheetXAI calls the fixtures and standings endpoints, flattens both JSON responses, and writes them into the workbook side by side. The fixture list lands in columns A through D. The standings land in columns H through O. Say "put standings on a separate tab" and it creates one.
What You Get
A single workbook tab with two structured data sets:
- Fixture list — all 380 rows with match date, home team, away team, and venue
- Standings table — all 20 clubs with played, won, drawn, lost, GF, GA, and points
Fixture dates arrive as readable Excel-formatted dates, not Unix timestamps. You do not have to run a conversion formula after the pull.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Most fixture-difficulty models need enrichment beyond the raw data. SheetXAI can add it in the same prompt.
When the fixture dates need converting to Excel serial format
Your charting model uses Excel date serial numbers. The dates in column A came through as text strings.
Convert the date values in column A from text strings to Excel date serial numbers. Write the converted values into a new column called 'Date Serial' formatted as Short Date.
When you want difficulty ratings calculated inline
You have the standings in columns H through O and the fixture list in columns A through D. You want a difficulty score per fixture without building a separate formula sheet.
For each fixture row, look up the away team's points from the standings table in column O and write a difficulty rating into column E: points divided by 114 to get a 0–1 scale, then label it Easy (under 0.33), Medium (0.33–0.66), or Hard (above 0.66).
When some future fixtures have placeholder venue data
API-Sports sometimes returns TBC for venue when the match location is not confirmed. You want those flagged before your model runs.
Find every row where the venue column contains TBC or is blank and highlight those cells in yellow. Write a count of TBC venues into cell F1.
When you want the full model in one pass
You have not pulled any data yet and you want the fixture list, the standings, the difficulty ratings, and a summary tab all from one prompt.
Pull all 2024/25 Premier League fixtures into columns A–D, then get the current standings into columns H–O. Calculate a difficulty rating per fixture in column E using the away team's points divided by 114 and label it Easy, Medium, or Hard. Create a 'Summary' tab showing each team's remaining fixture count broken down by difficulty band.
The pattern: instead of pulling the data and building the model separately in Power Query and Excel formulas, you describe the end state and SheetXAI handles the data pipeline and the analytical layer in one go.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull the current Premier League fixture list and standings into any Excel workbook you have open. The API-Sports integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to pull pre-match bookmaker odds by fixture ID in Excel or the API-Sports in Excel overview.