The Scenario
You are a football data journalist. Your season-review piece on La Liga 2023/24 is due in four days. You need the top 20 scorers and the top 20 assist-makers from that season merged into one Excel comparison table — player name, team, goals, and assists for both lists — so you can write about players who dominated on both metrics.
The bad version:
- You open Power Query, add a web data source with the API-Sports top scorers URL and your API key in the header
- Power Query flattens only the first level of JSON; the statistics array is still nested
- You write an M formula to expand it, get an error on the second expansion
- You give up on Power Query and write a Python script instead, get the scorers list, repeat for assists
- You paste both into Excel, try to build a cross-list VLOOKUP, find three names formatted differently across the two endpoints
- It is day two of four and you have not written a word of the article.
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, merges the two responses, and handles name normalisation automatically.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Get the top 20 scorers for La Liga season 2023 — player name, team, goals, assists — and put them in Sheet1 starting at A1. Then fetch the top 20 assist-makers for La Liga season 2023 and add them alongside in columns E through H. Highlight any player who appears in both lists.
SheetXAI fetches both endpoints, normalises player names across the two responses, writes the lists side by side, and applies conditional formatting to players appearing in both. The merged table is ready to write from.
What You Get
A single structured workbook tab:
- Columns A–D — top 20 scorers: player name, team, goals, assists
- Columns E–H — top 20 assist-makers: player name, team, assists, goals
- Highlighted rows — any player appearing in both lists
Name normalisation happens before the highlight logic runs, so "R. Lewandowski" and "Robert Lewandowski" resolve to the same player. You do not have to build fuzzy-match formulas in Excel.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Season-review tables often need analytical enrichment before publication. SheetXAI can add it inline.
When you want a combined G+A ranking column
Both lists are in the workbook but your editor wants a combined contribution score to rank all players across both lists.
For each player in this workbook, calculate a combined G+A score using the goals and assists columns. Deduplicate players who appear in both lists by taking the higher value for each metric. Write the combined G+A score into column I and sort descending.
When team names use abbreviations
API-Sports sometimes returns abbreviated club names. Your article uses full names and your editor will notice.
Expand any abbreviated team names in columns B and F to full La Liga club names. For example, 'Barça' should become 'FC Barcelona', 'Atleti' should become 'Atlético de Madrid'. Write the corrected names in place.
When you only want players who scored and assisted in double digits
You need a filtered callout box: players with 10 or more goals and 10 or more assists in the same season.
Filter the player table to show only players with 10 or more goals and 10 or more assists. Write those players into a new workbook tab called 'Elite Contributors' with their full stats.
When you need this for three leagues, not one
Your piece covers La Liga, Serie A, and Ligue 1. You want the same merged table for all three, each on its own tab.
Pull the top 20 scorers and top 20 assist-makers for La Liga season 2023 (league ID 140), Serie A season 2023 (league ID 135), and Ligue 1 season 2023 (league ID 61). Write each league's merged table to its own tab named after the league. Highlight cross-list players in each tab.
The pattern: instead of pulling three league data sets separately and building three cross-reference tables, you describe the full output and SheetXAI runs the three API calls and the merge logic in one go.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull top scorers and assist-makers from any league season into your Excel workbook. The API-Sports integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to build a team season stats comparison table in Excel or the API-Sports in Excel overview.