Switch from API-Football

1. Change the base URL and the key

Point your client at https://api-football.5dollarfootballapi.com and put your 5DollarFootballAPI key where the API-Football key was. The host accepts x-apisports-key, x-rapidapi-key (clients written against the RapidAPI listing) and Authorization: Bearer. Paths, query parameters and the response envelope stay as they are:

{
  "get": "fixtures",
  "parameters": { "live": "all" },
  "errors": [],
  "results": 6,
  "paging": { "current": 1, "total": 1 },
  "response": [ ... ]
}

One key, one plan, one quota: the compatible host and the native /v1 share your account's rate limit and league coverage.

2. Fetch our ids once

Every id your code hardcodes or your database stores must become ours. This is the one migration task; it takes a handful of requests.

1. Find each competition: GET /leagues?search=Premier or GET /leagues?code=GB-ENG. Save league.id.
2. Fetch its teams: GET /teams?league={id}&season={year}. Save team.id.
3. Fetch fixtures the way you already do: GET /fixtures?league={id}&season={year}. Fixture ids come back in every row.
4. Replace the old ids in code and in your database. Keep the two providers' ids in separate columns if you ever need to roll back.
5. Ids obtained from this host flow through every endpoint on it — /standings, /odds and the rest — and through /v1 too.

Store ids in a 64-bit integer column; public ids may exceed a signed 32-bit integer. The league coverage page lists every competition with its id.

3. Endpoint coverage

The host serves the fixtures, live scores, standings and odds endpoints with API-Football's parameters and response shapes. It does not claim the whole v3 surface: anything not listed answers with errors.endpoint instead of an empty success that looks like coverage.

Coming next

Routed and reserved, answering errors.endpoint until they ship: /fixtures/headtohead, /fixtures/rounds, /fixtures/events, /fixtures/statistics, /odds/live.

Not served

Player-level and venue data has no source in our feed. Keep API-Football, another provider or your own source for:

• Players, squads and player statistics
• Starting lineups and formations
• Injuries and sidelined players
• Transfers, coaches and trophies
• Venues
• Predictions
• Team statistics
• Team and league logos, player photos

4. Differences to know

Same shapes, honest values. Where our feed has no source for a field it is null, never invented; where a state cannot be vouched for, the response says so.

5. What the native API adds

The compatible host is a way in, not the whole product. The same key works on https://api.5dollarfootballapi.com/v1, where the data API-Football does not carry lives:

• Odds movement history — every pre-match and in-play price change, with the score at the time, years back.
• Corner and card standings — type=corner and type=card league tables.
• Corners and cards on every fixture, corner events in the timeline, and include=odds,events,stats to expand a whole list in one call.

Ids are the same on both hosts, so mixing them costs nothing.

6. Verify before switching production traffic

1. Create a free key, point a copy of your client at https://api-football.5dollarfootballapi.com, and fetch one league, its teams and a recent fixture.
2. Run both providers side by side for a scheduled, an in-play and a finished match. Compare your normalized model: kickoff, teams, score, status, standings and the odds markets you use.
3. Exercise the failure paths — a bad id, an out-of-plan league, a forced 429 — so your handling of errors and of Retry-After is real.
4. Switch read traffic gradually, keeping the old provider's ids in their own column until you are done.