football-docs

Searchable football data provider and tooling documentation for AI coding agents. Like Context7 for football data.

Who it's for: Developers and analysts who use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot) to work with football data. Works with any tool that supports MCP.

What it does: Gives your AI agent a searchable index of documentation for 21 football data providers and tools — event types, qualifier IDs, coordinate systems, API endpoints, data models, identity surfaces, and cross-provider comparisons for the data providers (StatsBomb, Opta, Wyscout, Impect, SkillCorner, Sportradar, TheSportsDB, FMDB Pro, TransferRoom, and more), plus the open-source libraries people build with (kloppy, mplsoccer, socceraction, soccerdata, floodlight, and more). Your agent looks up the real docs instead of guessing from training data.

Why not just let the AI figure it out? LLMs get football data specifics wrong constantly — Opta qualifier IDs, StatsBomb coordinate ranges, API endpoint URLs, library method signatures. These are mutable facts that change across versions. football-docs gives the agent verified, sourced documentation with provenance tracking so you know where every answer came from.

Strategy

football-docs is intended to be a community-owned, source-transparent Context7 for football data. The public operating contract is in STRATEGY.md: what belongs here, what must stay out, how we handle public-safe provider facts, and how contributors should prove retrieval quality.

Related MCP server: Unified Docs Hub

Provider identity facts

football-docs is the public source for provider identity-surface facts: access shape, ID schemes, matching fields, provider quirks, and provenance rules. Curated provider identity notes belong here when they can be stated as public facts about the provider. They should say whether a fact comes from public docs, public page evidence, licensed feed shape, or a reviewed public-safe observation, and must not include credentials, local paths, internal tooling details, or restricted payloads from any private project.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard for connecting AI coding tools to external data sources.

Quick start

Claude Code

claude mcp add football-docs -- npx -y football-docs

Cursor

Settings → MCP → Add server. Use this config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "football-docs": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "football-docs"]
    }
  }
}

VS Code / Copilot

Add to .vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "football-docs": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "football-docs"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "football-docs": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "football-docs"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

Provider filters use the indexed provider keys shown by list_providers, but common aliases are accepted. Examples: fbref, understat, ClubElo, football-data.co.uk, and engsoccerdata search free-sources; Sofascore and ESPN search soccerdata; FMDB searches fmdb-pro; Transfer Room searches transferroom; Hudl Wyscout searches wyscout; Stats Perform / Opta F24 / WhoScored search opta; Metrica, Sportec / DFL, and TRACAB search databallpy; Second Spectrum searches kloppy; SportRadar API / Soccer Extended search sportradar; The Sports DB / TSDB search thesportsdb; StatsBomb Open Data searches statsbomb.

Example queries

• "What is Opta qualifier 76?" (big chance)

• "How does StatsBomb represent shot events?"

• "Compare Opta and Wyscout coordinate systems"

• "What player ID fields does Transfermarkt expose?"

• "Does SportMonks have xG data?"

• "What event types does kloppy map to GenericEvent?"

• "How does SPADL represent a tackle?"

Indexed providers

1,356 searchable chunks across 21 providers and tools.

Impect documentation is built solely from the public ImpectAPI/open-data repository — a static Bundesliga 2023/24 snapshot, representative of Impect's structure and metric definitions rather than a complete or current mirror. Impect's commercial API is deliberately not documented here. Every enum value, KPI name and field name in docs/impect/ is validated against that repository in CI (pnpm impect:truth, src/__tests__/impect-open-data-validation.test.ts). Data source: Impect; use is subject to the repository's own Terms of Use.

Documentation validation

Docs for AI agents are only useful if they are correct, and prose about an API is exactly the kind of thing that drifts or gets invented. Where a machine-readable source of truth exists, this repo checks the docs against it in CI rather than trusting them.

Truth files live in data/provider-truth/ and are generated, not hand-written:

pnpm provider:truth      # rebuild every package truth file (needs python3.11)
pnpm openapi:truth       # rebuild every spec-derived truth file

The specs those derive from are snapshots of publicly published, unauthenticated vendor documentation. Source URLs, fetch dates and refresh instructions are in specs/README.md. Wyscout's three API versions merge into one truth file, because its docs legitimately span v2, v3 and v4.

Each package gets its own pinned venv — co-installing them makes pip silently downgrade conflicting versions, which would produce truth that disagrees with the docs. Bump a pin in scripts/gen_all_truth.sh and the matching version in providers.json together, then re-run and fix whatever the tests flag.

A doc that names an enum member or importable symbol which does not exist in the real package fails the build. scripts/gen_openapi_truth.py derives the same kind of facts from a vendor OpenAPI spec, for providers documented that way.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome from everyone. There are three ways to help:

1. Open an issue — request a new provider, flag outdated docs, or suggest a better doc source

2. Use the request_update tool — AI agents can flag outdated or missing docs directly via the MCP server, which queues requests locally and points to the matching public GitHub issue template

3. Open a PR — fix errors, add new providers, or improve existing docs

You don't need to be an expert. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide.

For maintainers

Crawl pipeline

Provider doc sources are tracked in providers.json. The crawl pipeline discovers the best doc source (llms.txt > ReadTheDocs > GitHub README) and writes markdown with provenance frontmatter.

npm run discover                        # probe sources without crawling
npm run crawl                           # crawl all providers with sources
npm run crawl -- --provider kloppy      # crawl one provider
npm run ingest                          # rebuild search index from docs/
npm run ingest -- --provider kloppy     # re-ingest one provider (incremental)

Each crawled doc carries provenance metadata (source URL, source type, upstream version, crawl timestamp) that is surfaced in search results, so agents can distinguish between curated content and upstream documentation.

License

MIT