General-purpose lookup for finding entities by name. Unlike exact-match endpoints (e.g. /football/countries), this endpoint tolerates misspellings, abbreviations, and alternate phrasings — useful for search-as-you-type UI and for mapping a free-text mention onto a canonical entity ID that can be passed to other endpoints.
Results are grouped by entity type; only the types requested are included in the response. Currently supported: country, league, team, fixture, player.
fixture search only covers matches in a rolling window from a few hours ago to about a week ahead, in top-tier leagues — i.e. upcoming fixtures and recently finished ones.
player search covers the players of the teams in that same window (from the team's squad, or its lineup when no squad has been published yet). Each result lists the player's teams and, per team, his fixtures in the window, plus his other current squads with no fixture. q may be a name alone ("Kostic", "F. Kostić") or a name plus a team ("Kostic Juventus"); when a team is recognised, matched_team_id says which, and namesakes at other teams rank lower. A squad is often published only a few days before a match, so a player can appear in results some hours after his team's fixture does.