specification: API Commons Lifecycle
specificationVersion: '0.1'
provider: API Football
providerId: api-football
generated: '2026-09-02'
modified: '2026-09-02'
method: probed
source: >-
  Host and path probes run 2026-09-02 against v3.football.api-sports.io,
  www.api-football.com, api-sports.io and the conventional status-page hostnames.
description: >-
  Versioning, deprecation and operational-transparency posture for API-Football.
  The picture is a stable, long-lived v3 surface with NO published deprecation
  policy, NO SLA and NO status page — the three artefacts an integrator needs to
  plan around change and outage. Absences below are probed, not assumed.
versioning:
  scheme: major-in-host-and-path
  current: v3
  detail: >-
    The direct channel carries the major version in the hostname
    (v3.football.api-sports.io); the RapidAPI channel carries it in the path
    (/v3/). There is no header or query-parameter version negotiation observable
    on the wire, and no date-based version pinning.
  verified: true
  previous_versions:
    - version: v2
      status: unknown
      note: >-
        A v2 existed historically (the docs route is /documentation-v3, implying a
        /documentation-v2 predecessor). Its retirement date and any migration
        guidance could not be read — the docs host answers our crawler with a
        Cloudflare managed challenge.
deprecation:
  policy_published: false
  sunset_header: false
  deprecation_header: false
  detail: >-
    No RFC 8594 `Sunset` header and no `Deprecation` header appeared on any probed
    response, and no deprecation-policy page was found on the site. No
    `Deprecation` pointer is wired into apis.yml.
  verified: true
  deprecated_operations: []
  deprecated_operations_note: >-
    Cannot be derived: the provider's OpenAPI is published but not retrievable
    (see conventions/api-football-conventions.yml → contract).
sla:
  published: false
  detail: No service-level agreement or uptime commitment was found on the public site.
  verified: false
status_page:
  published: false
  detail: >-
    There is no status page. `status.api-sports.io` and `status.api-football.com`
    do not resolve, `www.api-football.com/status` and `api-sports.io/status` are
    not routes, and `api-sports.statuspage.io` answers 200 only to 302 the caller
    to statuspage.io's own marketing site — an unclaimed subdomain, not a live
    Statuspage. No `StatusPage` pointer is wired into apis.yml.
  verified: true
  probes:
    - url: https://status.api-sports.io/
      status: 0
      note: DNS/connection failure
    - url: https://status.api-football.com/
      status: 0
      note: DNS/connection failure
    - url: https://api-sports.statuspage.io/api/v2/status.json
      status: 200
      note: 'body is `You are being redirected` to www.statuspage.io — not a real status page'
    - url: https://www.api-football.com/status
      status: 403
      note: not a route; Cloudflare challenge on the marketing host
announcement_channel:
  kind: blog
  url: https://www.api-football.com/news/
  detail: >-
    Product and coverage announcements are published to the site's news section
    rather than to a dated, machine-readable changelog. There is a news sitemap at
    https://www.api-football.com/news/sitemap.xml. No `changelog/` artifact is
    written because no dated changelog with version entries exists to record.
  verified: true
data_freshness:
  detail: >-
    The provider advertises live match data refreshed every 15 seconds, and its
    own widgets refuse a `data-refresh` interval below 15 seconds. This is the
    operational cadence an integrator should design against.
  verified: true
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: info@apievangelist.com