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Show HN: World Cup History MCP – every FIFA tournament 1930–2026 (api.zafronix.com)
1 points by zafronix 43 days ago
Hi HN — my previous post got flagged for some reason so re-posting to spread the word as well as get some actionable feedback.

When I was a kid and was playing soccer in my home town, my Dad had an idea - what if there was a correlation between a successful soccer player in a specific position and the birth month - i.e., can we determine based on a player's month of birth if he could statistically become a good goalkeeper, defender, midfielder, or an attacker? Obviously, back then the data was hard to come by and I did not think too much about it until recently.

Now, I'm my Dad's age when he vocalized the idea to me, he is still alive, and I felt an obligation to to build something to help him his own stats. That's main the reason I started to build the dataset for the World Cup API, which eventually grew as more data points were introduced. over a few weekends because LLMs are genuinely.

What you can find right now is - every World Cup since 1930, every group standing, every squad, every scorer, every match, every venue, etc. etc. etc.

In addition to the API, I've also wrapped it in an MCP and published it out for folks to play around and provide feedback.

I've also built a live sample dashboard if you want to preview without installing anything: https://api.zafronix.com/wc-explorer/

Otherwise, you can get started with a free API key takes 30 seconds, 1,000 req/day, no card. Repo + install: https://glama.ai/mcp/servers/zafronix/wc-mcp or find it on ChatGPT and Claude marketplace.

Like I said, looking for constructive feedback.

Thanks HN!

2 comments

> can we determine based on a player's month of birth if he could statistically become a good goalkeeper, defender, midfielder, or an attacker?

So, what’s the answer? My guess would be a “no”.

Because of the way age categories are defined, there is a correlation between month of birth and becoming a professional soccer player (https://medium.com/@giacorada/the-fascinating-birth-trend-am...), but I don’t see why these trends would differ between, say, goalkeepers and attackers.

The answer is no, there is no direction correlation between a successful soccer player in a certain position and their birth month... There are some months that stand out year over year but then you compare them to the GOATs and in most cases GOATs behave as outliers. It was a fun aspect to research though. There are many more scenarios to dig through - venue altitude (https://api.zafronix.com/wc-explorer/stadiums/), player age groups (https://api.zafronix.com/wc-explorer/players/)... data is there... I'm curious to see if there is a scenario that is currently not covered that would be fun to add to enhance the dataset further.
"That's main the reason I started to build the dataset for the World Cup API, which eventually grew as more data points were introduced. over a few weekends because LLMs are genuinely."

I don't understand. Did you use LLM for certain data?

It would make a good API for building a world cup quiz app.

Nice job.

I was typing on my phone and might have accidentally pasted the "the LLMs" piece, but to answer your question - yes, LLMs were used to enhance my existing data set. As for the quiz app - the API offers the /trivia endpoint already and one of my early adopters - siono.app - uses it for fun polls, etc. Technically, yes, you can build the whole trivia bank just on World Cup using the data.