ESPN Hidden API Multi-Sport Scores Scraper

Pricing

Rating

Developer

Actor stats

Categories

Share

Extract scores, schedules, team rosters, and athlete data from ESPN's undocumented public JSON APIs — covering NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, soccer, and more. No HTML parsing, no authentication, no proxy required.

Why the hidden API? ESPN's site.api.espn.com and sports.core.api.espn.com are the same endpoints ESPN's own website and mobile app use. They return clean, structured JSON and have been stable for years. Unlike HTML scrapers that break on every redesign, API-based extraction survives indefinitely.

What Data Does It Return?

All three modes return flat JSON records with consistent field names.

Scoreboard (scoreboard)

Game scores and schedules for any sport and league. Returns one record per game with home/away teams, scores, status (scheduled, in-progress, final), venue, and season/week context.

Team Roster (roster)

All athletes on a specific team's roster. Returns athlete name, position, jersey number, and status. Requires the ESPN teamId (find it from scoreboard home_team_id / away_team_id fields).

Athlete List (athletes)

Paginated full league athlete directory via sports.core.api.espn.com. Returns athlete name, position, jersey, and team association for every active (and recently inactive) player in the league.

Input

Example Inputs

NBA games today:

{
"dataType":"scoreboard",
"sport":"basketball",
"league":"nba",
"maxItems":20
}

NFL Week 1 2025 schedule:

{
"dataType":"scoreboard",
"sport":"football",
"league":"nfl",
"date":"20250907",
"maxItems":50
}

Premier League today:

{
"dataType":"scoreboard",
"sport":"soccer",
"league":"eng.1",
"maxItems":20
}

Los Angeles Lakers roster (teamId 13):

{
"dataType":"roster",
"sport":"basketball",
"league":"nba",
"teamId":"13",
"maxItems":20
}

Full NBA athlete directory:

{
"dataType":"athletes",
"sport":"basketball",
"league":"nba",
"maxItems":500
}

Output Schema

Each record is a flat JSON object. Fields not applicable to the current dataType are null.

Supported Sports and Leagues

Any valid ESPN sport/league slug combination works. Invalid combinations return an empty events array.

Tips

• Find team IDs: Run a scoreboard query, then read home_team_id and away_team_id from the results.
• Historical scores: Pass a date in YYYYMMDD format to the scoreboard mode to retrieve past game results.
• Off-season: Scoreboard queries during the off-season return zero or few results — this is expected.
• Rate limits: ESPN's CDN is permissive. No proxy needed. For bulk roster pulls across all teams, run one query per team with maxItems: 0.