Golf API Basics

This guide covers the practical basics of working with the Sportradar Golf API: how to authenticate, how request URLs are structured, the supported formats, rate limits, versioning, and the companion tools. The Golf API is a tournament-based, US-style golf data product; for the concepts behind the data, see Fundamentals.

Authentication

Every request is authenticated with your API key, sent in the x-api-key header. Your key is in your Sportradar developer account under your application's credentials; Make Your First Call covers creating an account and issuing a key.

GET https://api.sportradar.com/golf/trial/v3/en/seasons.json
x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY

Keep the key server-side; do not embed it in client applications. The same key authenticates the REST feeds and, for entitled customers, the Push streams.

Base URL and URL Structure

All requests go to https://api.sportradar.com/golf/. Three URL shapes appear in the API, and they differ in where the version and tour segments sit. Knowing which is which prevents malformed requests.

• Seasons (no tour, no year; version comes first):

GET https://api.sportradar.com/golf/{access_level}/v3/{language_code}/seasons.{format}

• Tournament-scoped (tour and season year wrap the version):

GET https://api.sportradar.com/golf/{access_level}/{golf_tour}/v3/{language_code}/{season_year}/tournaments/schedule.{format}

• Push (streaming; no v3 version segment at all):

GET https://api.sportradar.com/golf/{access_level}/stream/{golf_tour}/{language_code}/{push_feed}/subscribe

The common path placeholders are access_level (trial or production), golf_tour (the lowercase tour alias, for example pga), language_code (for example en), season_year, and format (json or xml). The Player-level feeds (Player Profile, Official World Golf Ranking) use the tour-less shape; the tournament feeds use the tour-scoped shape. The Push streams are not path-versioned, so do not insert v3 into a Push URL.

Golf API Map

The map below shows every feed in the API, grouped by task; the key marks the identifier each feed takes. Tournament-scoped feeds also carry the tour and season year in the path (the URL shapes above), and the two Per Round feeds add a round number.

Response Formats

Every feed supports both json and xml, selected by the format segment of the URL (for example schedule.json or schedule.xml). The two carry the same data; choose per your stack.

Rate Limits and QPS

Access is governed by a request quota and a queries-per-second (QPS) limit:

• Exceeding the QPS limit returns 429 Too Many Requests; space out calls and retry with exponential backoff.
• Plan your polling against these limits and the per-feed Update Frequencies; prefer Push for live data so you are not polling at high QPS.

Errors

• Authentication failures return 403 with an HTML body (an "Authentication Error" page), not a JSON error object, so branch on the status code rather than parsing the response.
• Rate-limit errors return 429.
• The feeds otherwise use standard HTTP methods and status codes; the Response Codes page lists them.

Versioning

The Golf API is available in multiple supported versions; v3 is the latest and v2 is still supported. Version support and deprecation timelines follow Sportradar's Versioning Policy. Track changes to the data through the Daily Change Log feed and the Golf API Change Log.

Companion Tools

• Postman: fork the Sportradar Golf collection to exercise every feed without writing code.
• Schema download: the Golf v3 XSD bundle for validating and generating types from xml responses.
• MCP Server: the Sportradar Golf MCP Server bridges AI assistants directly to the Golf API feeds.

Validating State Handling

To exercise how your integration handles each tournament, round, and player status, work against recent completed tournaments: the standard feeds return their full final state, and the Tournament Status Workflow page pairs every status value with a captured example you can code against.