Launched a football stats API

the hard part wasn't the code, it was the data

I've spent the last while building TournamentStats, a REST API covering every World Cup since 1930 and every Euros since 1960. Just got it live on RapidAPI.

Technically it's about as simple as an API gets — plain PHP, no framework, MySQL, runs on shared hosting. That was deliberate; I didn't want a deploy pipeline for a side project.

What actually took the time was the data itself. Historical football stats scattered across the internet are full of small, compounding errors. I found one in my own build partway through — a join bug that was reporting Pelé at 48 career goals instead of the real 12, because it was double-counting him once per tournament appearance. Cross-checking decades of records against primary sources ended up being most of the actual work.

I went with RapidAPI for distribution rather than building my own billing/auth/rate-limiting — mainly to keep this manageable as a solo side project. Curious whether others here have done the same vs. going direct, and whether you'd make the same call again. Any regrets?