ISO country code for national teams ?
For national teams, would it be possible to add an ISO country code (e.g. "TR", "NL") to each team, in addition to the name?
Right now we have to guess/translate the exact name you use (e.g. "Türkiye" vs "Turkey", "Netherlands" vs local names), which breaks our name-matching every time a country's naming convention changes or we guess wrong.
A stable ISO code would fix this for good, independent of the displayed name.
thanks
Resolution: country_code added to Team and the API; backfilled from data we already held.
Comments
3
Bzzoiro · Admin
Sep 27, 2026 11:14
Done, and thank you — the "Türkiye vs Turkey" example is exactly why this needed doing.
Every team now carries `country_code` next to `country`:
{"id": 932, "name": "Türkiye", "country": "Türkiye", "country_code": "TR"}
321 of 328 national teams have it, and 6,384 teams in total. It cost us nothing to collect: the code was already arriving in every match payload and we simply were not keeping it.
Two things it is not, and I would rather say them here than have you find out:
1. It is not strictly ISO 3166-1, and I am not going to label it as such. It agrees with ISO wherever ISO has a code, and uses the customary one where it does not — England EN, Scotland SX, Wales WA, Northern Ireland NX, all four of which are GB in ISO. If you need real ISO for those four, map them yourself; at least now you have something stable to map from.
2. It identifies the country, not the team. Argentina and Argentina U23 both carry AR. Keep using id to identify a team.
Empty string when we have none — a handful of historical sides (USSR, Yugoslavia, East Germany) have no code to give, and 1,856 clubs have never appeared in a fixture carrying country data.
Docs: /docs/football/teams-players/ under "Matching a team to a country".
- Bzzoiro
Sep 27, 2026 15:20
Thank you for your promptness!
Sep 27, 2026 15:30
« Is there a way to look up a team's fixtures directly by country_code, without needing to guess the exact name you use for it? »
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