Esports API: Free Data Sources for Dota 2, CS2, League of Legends and Valorant

An esports API serves match results, teams, players, tournaments and live game state for competitive video games. This page covers that data side; for betting prices, see our esports odds API guide. The one source that serves full match data with no key and no account is OpenDota, a free, open-source Dota 2 API at https://api.opendota.com/api, run by volunteers rather than by Valve. Riot Games, Valve (the Steam Web API) and Faceit run official APIs, and each one gates most data behind a key tied to an account. Liquipedia's wiki API needs no key, but its terms ask for a named User-Agent.

We called every OpenDota endpoint on this page on 2 November 2026, at about 10:35 pm US Eastern. For the keyed APIs we read the docs and quote them, each fact marked "from the docs, checked November 2026". We did not sign up for keys, so no sample here calls them.

OpenDota covers Dota 2 only, in depth. /leagues listed 10,412 leagues, each tagged with a tier (2,485 "professional", 214 "premium"). /proPlayers listed 5,738 accounts, and Team Spirit's match history went back to May 2019.

CS2 has no equivalent. Steam serves the live player count and patch news without a key, Faceit's Data API needs one, Liquipedia holds results as wiki pages, and HLTV offers no API. For League of Legends and Valorant, Riot's API serves accounts, matches and ranked ladders; its API list at developer.riotgames.com/apis shows no endpoint for pro league schedules (checked November 2026).

ESPN's free feed carries no esports: sports/esports/lol/scoreboard returned 400, "sport 'esports' and/or league 'lol' are invalid". The ESPN API guide covers the leagues it does carry, and our free sports APIs page lists more free feeds. None of the sources here serves betting odds.

Paths sit under https://api.opendota.com/api, and the OpenAPI spec at that root lists 55. Every one below returned 200 on 2 November 2026.

At the time of our call, 98 of the 100 games in /live had no league_id, and the 2 league games had empty team names.

https://api.opendota.com/api/matches/{match_id}

This endpoint returns everything OpenDota holds on one game. Our test match, 9073699287, was CyberHero against GamerLegion in EPL Masters 2026 on 2 November. GamerLegion, on the Dire side, won 32 kills to 12 in 38 minutes, and the response held 10 players and 24 draft entries.

Parsed matches add teamfights, objectives and chat. Heroes come as numbers, so join hero_id to /heroes. In players, name holds the pro name (Yuma went 15/2/7 on Ursa) and personaname holds the Steam name.

The player matches endpoint also filters on hero_id, lobby_type, date (days back) and win, per the spec. Skip /search?q= for pros: it matches Steam names, and our search for "Yatoro" returned 50 accounts in 2.8 seconds, none of them Team Spirit's player. Filter /proPlayers on name and team_id instead.

Each sample runs as written with no key. We ran all three on 2 November 2026.

Latest pro results in Python

import requests

matches = requests.get('https://api.opendota.com/api/proMatches', timeout=10).json()
for m in matches[:5]:
    radiant = m['radiant_name'] or 'Radiant'
    dire = m['dire_name'] or 'Dire'
    winner = radiant if m['radiant_win'] else dire
    print(m['match_id'], m['league_name'].strip(), '|', radiant, 'vs', dire, '| won:', winner)

The first line it printed: "9073699287 EPL Masters 2026 | CyberHero vs GamerLegion | won: GamerLegion". Some rows have null team names, which is why the sample falls back to the side.

A team and a SQL query with cURL

# One team's rating and record (Team Spirit)
curl 'https://api.opendota.com/api/teams/7119388'

# Your own SQL: the last three games of league 19944
curl -G 'https://api.opendota.com/api/explorer' \
  --data-urlencode 'sql=SELECT match_id, radiant_win, duration FROM matches WHERE leagueid = 19944 ORDER BY match_id DESC LIMIT 3'

One match's player lines in JavaScript

// Node 18 or later
const base = 'https://api.opendota.com/api';
Promise.all([
  fetch(`${base}/heroes`).then(r => r.json()),
  fetch(`${base}/matches/9073699287`).then(r => r.json()),
]).then(([heroes, match]) => {
  const hero = Object.fromEntries(heroes.map(h => [h.id, h.localized_name]));
  console.log(match.league.name.trim(), '|', match.radiant_team.name, 'vs', match.dire_team.name);
  for (const p of match.players) {
    const side = p.isRadiant ? 'Radiant' : 'Dire';
    console.log(side, p.name || p.personaname, hero[p.hero_id], `${p.kills}/${p.deaths}/${p.assists}`);
  }
});

It printed the league and both teams, then ten player lines, from "Radiant sematary Windranger 2/8/5" to "Dire Bignum Hoodwink 6/3/14".

Riot Games API (from the docs, checked November 2026)

Signing in at developer.riotgames.com with a Riot account creates a development key, and those keys "deactivate every 24 hours". A personal key, meant for "just the developer or a small private community", allows "20 requests every 1 second" and "100 requests every 2 minutes" per region. Production keys start at 500 requests every 10 seconds. The docs give no separate number for the development key. Valorant is stricter: "personal keys are not offered for VALORANT", and Valorant apps need Riot Sign On, which only production keys get. The reference takes the key as a query or header parameter, and our call with neither returned 401.

Steam Web API

Valve's developer page says "All use of the Steam Web API requires the use of an API Key", issued at steamcommunity.com/dev/apikey after a Steam login. The partner docs say some methods "do not require authorization", and these two answered without a key:

Dota 2 match history and CS2 player stats need the key. A key goes in key= or the x-webapi-key header (from the docs, checked November 2026).

Faceit Data API (from the docs, checked November 2026)

The Data API at https://open.faceit.com/data/v4 serves "all publicly available information on faceit.com": championships, hubs, matches with /matches/{match_id}/stats, players, rankings and teams, by game_id. You create an app in Faceit's developer portal, add a server-side or client-side key, and send it as a Bearer token. The reference lists a 429 "Too many requests" response but states no number.

Liquipedia runs one MediaWiki wiki per game, each with an API at https://liquipedia.net/{wiki}/api.php. It needs no key, and its API terms say generic agents such as "Python-requests" are "likely to be blocked". We sent User-Agent: sportsapis.dev-guide/1.0 (https://sportsapis.dev; info@sportsapis.dev) and Accept-Encoding: gzip, spaced 3 seconds apart.

Wikitext is raw markup, so you parse templates such as {{Infobox team}} yourself. Its teamid=7119388 is OpenDota's id for Team Spirit, a ready join between the two.

HLTV.org, a site with "CS2 news, CS2 match information", publishes no API. Its terms, effective 27 January 2025, forbid users to "conduct, facilitate or organize data mining or web scraping in relation to the Website". hltv.org answered our script and our fetch tool with 403, so we read the Internet Archive copy of 3 October 2026. This page documents no HLTV endpoint.

OpenDota 404 and 400

/matches/1, /matches/abc and an unknown path returned 404 with {"error":"Not Found"}. /players/abc returned 400, "invalid account id". /explorer with no sql returned 400, "sql is not a string", and a bad column returned 400 with the database error.

OpenDota 200 with an empty body

/teams/999999999 and /leagues/99999999 returned 200 and zero bytes, so response.json() throws. Check the length before you parse.

Keyed and blocked calls

Steam's IDOTA2Match_570/GetMatchHistory returned 403, "Please verify your key= parameter", and ISteamApps/GetAppList/v2/ returned 404, "Method 'GetAppList' not found". Riot returned 401, "apikey or authorization header is empty". Faceit's API answered a no-key call with a 403 challenge page. Liquipedia reports errors inside a 200: a search with no srsearch returned "code":"missingparam".

• OpenDota limits: no key gives 60 calls a minute and 3,000 a day (/api/metadata). Each data response we got carried x-rate-limit-remaining-minute and x-rate-limit-remaining-day. A key from opendota.com/api-keys costs $0.01 per 100 calls, needs a payment method and allows 3,000 calls a minute. We hit no 429.
• Riot: the General Policies say "Your product cannot feature betting or gambling functionality."
• Steam: the API terms license Steam data to end users "for their personal use" and cap you at 100,000 calls a day.
• Liquipedia: 1 request per 2 seconds, action=parse once per 30 seconds, gzip, CC-BY-SA 3.0 with credit to Liquipedia, and no "automated access to non-API endpoints". Breaking the rules brings "automated temporary IP bans".

For an odds product, a paid app or anything with an SLA, use licensed esports data providers: compare licensed sports data providers and the esports odds APIs.

Browse API Providers →

• odota/core on GitHub: the OpenDota server code under the MIT licence, with setup notes for running your own copy.
• odota/dotaconstants on GitHub: hero, item, game mode and lobby type ids, the lookup tables the OpenDota spec points to.
• python-opendota on PyPI: a Python SDK generated from the OpenDota spec, version 3.0.0 from February 2023.
• Riot-Watcher on GitHub: a Python wrapper for the Riot Games API (riotwatcher 3.3.1 on PyPI). It needs your own Riot key.