Online football games have become very common over the past few years. In the UK alone, the number of people playing online football games has increased by around 25%. As a result, the number of people watching football matches on TV has dropped steadily since the introduction of online football games. However, this is only one side of the story. There are many reasons for and consequences of the increasing popularity of online football games.
One of the best things about online football games is that they give you a chance to play against real life competition. Most games today are even based on statistics from football leagues like the premier League or Bundesliga. Aside from composing a team of choice, you get to mimic the actual strength, agility, speed and qualities of your favourite players too in online games. You can’t get any closer to the real deal!
The secret to quality football games
The technology behind the best online football games relies on real life sports data. This is how applications are able to receive and interpret data from different leagues, matches and players and turn it into in-app data. What all quality online football games have in common, is a strong football API.
An API (application programming interface) is the needed connection between real life sports data and online applications. By connecting sports data to football applications through an API, the data is seamlessly transferred and interpreted to benefit the quality of the game.
However, not every football API is the same. Where some providers of sports APIs focus solely on a specific league or country, other providers manage to offer a wide variety of leagues, countries and even sports. Depending on what application is desired, the right API must be selected.
Building an API from scratch
As a web developer, you can always choose to build your own API fitted to your application. However, despite the perfect fit of the API, you’ll probably run into quite some problems. First of all, building an API takes an incredible amount of time and effort. And that’s just the outlines. Refining the API to eliminate bugs and optimize its compatibility, even more time and energy is needed. Second, building the API is just the first step. Maintaining the football API and making sure it covers the desired data is added to the workload.
This is why most successful football applications decide to choose a football API provider, register a membership and implement a pre-built API into their application. It’ll definitely save you time, and in most cases money too! Memberships aren’t generally all too expensive and can often be tailored to just the data you need. Moreover, the pre-built APIs are continuously optimized by your specialized provider so you’ll never have to worry about faulty data or outdated technology.
