The Scenario
You are a sports agency analyst. Transfer window closes in three weeks and your firm represents a client who is evaluating five central midfielder prospects. The recruitment director wants a one-page comparison sheet before a client meeting on Friday: career clubs, seasons played at each, and career goal totals for each player.
You have the API-Sports player IDs. You need the career history out of the API and into a structured sheet, one tab per player, before the meeting.
The bad version:
- You call the player career endpoint for ID 276, get back a JSON array with 12 club stints, each with a nested statistics object
- You flatten it by hand into a sheet tab for player one
- You repeat the process for players 874, 284, 306, and 521
- Each response has slightly different nesting because the API schema changed between the earlier and later seasons
- You finish the fifth player's tab and realise player 284 has two stints at the same club in different seasons that you collapsed incorrectly
- The Friday meeting is in four hours and you are fixing a data error in tab three.
The faster version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that calls the player career endpoint for a list of IDs and writes each player's history to its own tab automatically.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For player IDs 276, 874, 284, 306, and 521, fetch their career club history — club name, season, appearances, goals — and write each player to a separate sheet tab named after the player. Put a summary tab at the front listing each player's total career appearances and total career goals.
SheetXAI calls the API-Sports player/trophies and player/statistics endpoints for each ID, writes the career history to individual tabs, and builds the summary tab with career totals. If a player has two stints at the same club in different seasons, they appear as separate rows, which is correct.
What You Get
Five career history tabs plus one summary:
- Per-player tabs — club name, season, appearances, goals, one row per stint
- Summary tab — player name, total career appearances, total career goals across all clubs and seasons
Each stint at a club is a separate row, so you can see loan spells, youth returns, and second-stint data clearly without collapsed entries that hide the detail.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Scouting comparison sheets usually need more analytical layers. SheetXAI can add them in the same prompt.
When career stats include loan stints you want to separate
Two of the five players had loan stints that inflated their appearance count at a parent club. You want loan rows flagged separately so the client can read the base-club career clearly.
For each player tab, identify rows where the club name includes '(loan)' in the API data or where the stint lasted fewer than 6 months. Flag those rows with a 'Loan' label in column E so the client can distinguish loan appearances from permanent-contract appearances.
When you want goals-per-game added as a comparison metric
The recruitment director wants an efficiency metric. Career goals divided by career appearances, shown on the summary tab.
On the Summary tab, add a column called 'Goals per Game' calculated as total goals divided by total appearances, rounded to two decimal places. Sort the summary tab by Goals per Game descending.
When one player ID returns no data for a season
API-Sports occasionally has gaps for lower-league seasons or for players who were inactive. You want those gaps flagged rather than silently dropped.
For any season where appearance data is missing or zero, write 'Data Unavailable' into the appearances column rather than leaving it blank. Add a note in column F for those rows so the analyst knows to verify manually.
When you want the full scouting brief built in one pass
You have the five player IDs but nothing else. You want the career tabs, the summary, the goals-per-game metric, a trophy count per player, and a flagged column for Premier League experience, all before the Friday meeting.
For player IDs 276, 874, 284, 306, and 521, fetch career club history and write each to a separate tab. Build a Summary tab with total career appearances, total goals, goals per game (rounded to 2 decimal places), number of trophies won, and a Yes/No column for whether the player has Premier League experience. Sort the summary by goals per game descending.
The pattern: instead of pulling five API responses, building five tabs, and then building a summary sheet separately, you describe the full deliverable once and SheetXAI runs the data pipeline and the analytical layer together.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull career history for a list of player IDs into your sheet with one tab per player. The API-Sports integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to build a top scorers and assists comparison table or the API-Sports in Google Sheets overview.