Where 4Football's Scores and Stats Come From
4Football started as a search engine. Now it has live scores, team and player pages, fantasy and odds — built entirely on open data. Here is what is under the hood, and what we chose not to use.
4Football began as a search engine built for one subject: American football, from Friday nights to Sundays. Search is still the centre of the site. What is new is everything around it — a live scoreboard, a page for every team and player, standings, rankings, fantasy tools and betting trends.
We built all of it on data that is published openly or offered under a documented API. This post explains where each piece comes from, how fresh it is, and the trade-offs we made.
The NFL: nflverse
Nearly everything NFL on this site comes from nflverse, an open-source project maintained by football analysts and released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. From it we get:
- the full schedule, final scores and betting lines, refreshed every five minutes in season
- rosters, injury reports, snap counts, weekly player and team stats
- combine results, contracts and draft history going back decades
We compute the standings and playoff picture ourselves from those final scores, along with every team's against-the-spread record and the all-time results behind the head-to-head tool.
College: four levels, one scoreboard
Our college scoreboards cover FBS, FCS, Division II and Division III, with the game clock and quarter while games are in progress, plus the AP and Coaches polls and conference standings. CollegeFootballData.com's live feed reinforces the FBS scoreboard once our subscription key is active.
Weather, fantasy and the rest
- Game-day forecasts come from the U.S. National Weather Service for each outdoor stadium's exact location at kickoff.
- Expected fantasy points come from the open ffopportunity model, and dynasty trade values from DynastyProcess.
- Team news is not a feed at all — it is our own search engine. Every team, player and game page links straight into the relevant search topic.
How "live" is live?
Honest answer: it depends on the league.
| What | How fresh |
|---|---|
| College scores (all levels) | About a minute while games are live |
| NFL final scores, schedule, lines | Within about five minutes |
| NFL in-game scores | Live where our real-time overlay is active; otherwise games show "Live" until the final posts |
| Rosters, injuries | Daily |
| Player and team stats | Nightly |
| Weather | Hourly |
When a source has a problem, you will see a "scores delayed" note and the last good numbers, rather than a blank page or a guess.
One collector, polite by design
Your browser never contacts any of these sources. A single job on our server gathers the data on a schedule and writes small snapshot files; every visitor reads those. Whether ten people or ten thousand are watching the ticker, each upstream source sees the same one request a minute.
That collector identifies itself honestly by name. If a source declines a request, we back off and use a fallback. We do not disguise our software as a web browser to get around a block.
What we chose not to use
Some of the most popular "free" sports data on the internet is not actually free to reuse, and we would rather tell you than quietly rely on it:
- ESPN's undocumented API. It is unlicensed, and in our testing it turned away software that identified itself honestly. We will not build a site on a source we would have to sneak into.
- Sleeper's API is generous but limited to non-commercial use.
- High-school score aggregators prohibit reuse. So our high school hub does something different: it sends you to the local newspapers and TV stations that actually covered the game.
- Player headshots belong to the leagues and their photographers.
Logos and trademarks
Team names and logos belong to their owners; we use small versions purely so you can identify a team at a glance. Any rights-holder who prefers otherwise can ask, and that team switches to a neutral colour badge across the entire site.
The complete list, with licences and a live feed-status table, is always on the data sources page.