If you have ever wondered how a fixture from Play-Cricket ends up on a club website, in a Google Calendar, or on a Saturday result graphic without anyone retyping it, the answer is the Play-Cricket API. This guide explains the API for club admins who are not developers: what it is, what it holds, how to get access, and how to tell a compliant tool from a dodgy one.
What is the Play-Cricket API, in plain English?
An API is a doorway between two pieces of software. The Play-Cricket API is the official doorway the ECB provides so that approved tools can read your club's Play-Cricket data without a human copying and pasting it. When a tool asks the doorway "give me this club's fixtures", the Play-Cricket API sends them back in a tidy, machine-readable format that another program can drop onto a website, into a calendar, or onto a graphic.
Two words matter here. It is read-only, so a tool can look at your fixtures and results but cannot change them or post anything back into Play-Cricket. And it is permissioned, so the doorway stays locked until your club is issued a key. That key is what turns "anyone could grab this" into "only tools my club has authorised can".
What data does the Play-Cricket API actually expose?
The Play-Cricket API covers the data your club already puts into the platform. It does not invent anything new, and it does not reach into other clubs. In practice, a club key gives an approved tool read access to:
- Fixtures. Date, start time, opposition, ground, competition, and home or away, for every team you run.
- Results. The outcome, the margin, and the headline scores once a match is closed.
- Scorecards. Batting and bowling figures, so milestone graphics can pull a fifty, a hundred or a five-wicket haul without a manual retype.
- Teams and players. Squad and selection data tied to your club, subject to the platform's own privacy rules for junior players.
Because this is a proper Play-Cricket data export API rather than a screenshot, the data arrives clean and labelled. A "start time" is always a start time, an "opposition" is always an opposition. That reliability is what lets a tool build the same fixture graphic eleven times on a Saturday morning without a volunteer checking every field.
Do you need to be a developer to use the Play-Cricket API?
No. This is the part that trips up most committees. You do not have to write a line of code, and nobody on your committee needs to understand JSON. The job splits cleanly in two.
Your side is simple: a Play-Cricket site administrator requests the key, keeps it safe, and hands it to a tool you trust. The tool's side is the technical bit: it calls the Play-Cricket API on a schedule, reads the data, and turns it into whatever you need. If your club uses a vendor like Boundary Social, the developer work has already been done. You are effectively lending your key to a machine that knows how to use the doorway, then getting on with running the club.
How do you get a Play-Cricket API key?
Getting a Play-Cricket API key is an email, not a form to fill in on a developer portal. This is the exact Play-Cricket API key how to get sequence we walk clubs through, and it is the same route whether you plan to use a vendor or build something yourself.
- Confirm who holds admin rights. Only a Play-Cricket site administrator should request the key. If that is not you, loop in whoever it is first.
- Email ECB Play-Cricket Support from a club admin address. Include the club name, your Play-Cricket site URL, your name and role, and a one-line description of what the key is for.
- Wait for the key. In our experience turnaround is a few working days, and longer in March and April when half the country is requesting ECB Play-Cricket developer access at the same time.
- Store it like a password. Do not paste it into a public WhatsApp group, do not commit it to a shared drive, do not email it on to a stranger.
- Know how to revoke it. If your club changes vendor, or the secretary changes, ask ECB Play-Cricket Support to rotate the key. A good tool lets you swap keys without re-onboarding the whole club.
That is the whole process. There is no coding test and no charge for the key itself. The one thing worth planning around is timing: request it in February if you want everything humming by the first Saturday of the season.
Play-Cricket API vs scraping: why does the key matter?
You will occasionally see tools that promise Play-Cricket data without asking your club for a key. That should stop you cold. If a tool is not using your ECB-issued key, it is almost certainly scraping, which means copying pages off the website without permission. Scraping breaches the platform terms, it breaks the moment the ECB changes a page layout, and it puts your club's name next to an unauthorised data grab.
The Play-Cricket API is the sanctioned alternative. It is slower to set up by a few days, because you have to request the key, but it is the only route that keeps your club on the right side of ECB rules. Here is the honest comparison.
| Factor | Play-Cricket API (with your key) | Scraping (no key) |
|---|---|---|
| Permission | Granted per club by the ECB | None |
| Data quality | Clean, labelled fields | Fragile, breaks on layout changes |
| Within platform terms | Yes | No |
| Junior privacy respected | Yes, follows platform rules | Unclear |
| Survives an ECB update | Yes | Often not |
| Setup effort | One key request | None, and that is the warning sign |
The short version: if a tool never asks for your key, ask it why. Across the roughly 2,970 ECB-affiliated recreational clubs in England and Wales ([STAT NEEDS VERIFICATION], source: ECB National Club Registration figures), the ones getting this right are the ones who treated the key request as step one, not an afterthought.
What can your club do once it has API access?
Once your key is in a capable tool, the same clean data feeds everything at once, and it all corrects itself when the league reschedules a game. The wins clubs actually use:
Win 1. Fixtures on your own website. A live fixtures table in your club colours, refreshed automatically, instead of a manual list that goes stale by May.
Win 2. A live calendar feed. Players and parents subscribe once in Google or Apple Calendar and never miss a start-time change. The step-by-step is in our guide to exporting Play-Cricket fixtures to CSV, which covers both the manual snapshot and the live API route.
Win 3. Match-day graphics that build themselves. Fixture, result and milestone graphics pull their fields straight from the Play-Cricket API, so a rained-off game that moves two weeks does not leave a wrong poster online.
None of this asks the volunteer to become a developer. The key sits in one place, the Play-Cricket API does the fetching, and the club just looks organised.
Related reading:
- Play-Cricket integration for UK clubs, the pillar guide, which is the full Play-Cricket integration guide to requesting and using your key.
- How to export Play-Cricket fixtures to CSV, two methods
- Boundary Social pricing, if you want the key handed to a done-for-you tool rather than building it yourself.