Find Historical Odds and Data: What Each Source Lets You Do
You want a price from months ago, and every source either sells something or forbids something.
Where you find historical betting odds depends on what you are about to do with them, not on habit.
Checking one old price takes a free archive you browse by hand, nothing to install. A football-only spreadsheet for personal use costs nothing either, under a free provider's own rules. Anything wider than football, bought once, comes from a handful of paid files priced by season. A live, timestamped feed for backtesting at scale sits behind a paid subscription API, and free tiers never include history. None of that is the same as a broker's export of your own betting history, which tracks you, never the market.
Most sports betting data mining projects do not start with a model. They start with someone stuck on one question: which source, for which job? Search results split into two worlds that never talk: API vendors quoting their own coverage, and free archives that never say what you are allowed to do with what you find. Neither explains where a betting broker fits, and the honest answer is that it mostly does not: where the best odds actually sit has nothing to do with who sells last season's prices as a CSV.
Where to find historical betting odds, by what you're about to do with them
Five jobs, five sources. Match yours below before you open a wallet.
-
Checking one old price, nothing to build
No account, no download: open a free archive and scroll to the match. OddsPortal's results pages and Covers.com's sportsoddshistory section both work this way, free, no sign-up. Useless past one match at a time.
-
A personal football spreadsheet, budget zero
football-data.co.uk gives away CSV files: dozens of leagues, results back decades, bookmaker prices for recent seasons. Free, the deepest free football set around. Its terms say who it is for: "private individuals only, NOT commercial or data training products using automated bots/scrapers/AI." A personal tracker fits; a bot does not.
-
One file, wider than football, bought once
oddswarehouse.com sells static CSV files instead of an archive: pick a league or a tennis tour, pay once, no subscription. Tens of dollars for one season, low hundreds for a longer bundle. Its "investment" framing belongs to a spreadsheet, not a promise about earnings.
-
A live, timestamped feed for backtesting at scale
the-odds-api.com and similar vendors sell odds snapshots timestamped to the minute, across a wide list of sports. Every one found here keeps historical odds data behind a paid plan, current prices only on the free tier.
-
Tracking your own bets, not the market
None of the four sources above track what you staked, only what the market did. Sportmarket lets you export your own betting analytics as CSV or Excel once you hold an account there: your stakes, your results, nothing about the wider market. See the full Sportmarket review for the rest of what that broker offers.
What none of Bet Abroad's operators will hand you
Every one of the five sources above sits outside Bet Abroad's own operator list: nothing to sell, just a citation. A bet broker doubling as a data vendor is a tempting assumption. It does not.
MadMarket's terms restrict use to personal, non-commercial purposes and rule out scraping and automated copying outright. That is the polite version. The blunt one: nobody behind these accounts is selling you their order book. FairExchange, opened through Sportmarket, bans API robots outright too. An API attributed to BetInAsia turns up in older tests; recent reviews say it was pulled, so reports disagree on whether this still exists.
None of this is a hint to find a workaround: a scraper aimed at a banned-scraper site is a terms violation, not a clever hack. Whether betting itself is legal where you live is a separate question, worth checking too.
Five sources, compared
Read the five rows below against your own project, not as a ranking: they answer different jobs. Covers.com's NFL archive happens to run back to 1952. That predates most of today's leagues by decades, more a fact about American sports media than anything a working bettor needs day to day. Back to the comparison: free or paid, format, coverage, depth and the usage rule that matters most.
| Source | Free or paid | Format | Sports covered | Historical depth | Usage restriction | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| the-odds-api.com | Paid; free tier is live prices only | JSON API, timestamped snapshots | Wide: soccer, US majors, tennis and more | Several years of snapshots, paid plans only | None stated; check your plan's terms first | Not fully confirmed |
| football-data.co.uk | Free | Downloadable CSV or Excel | Football only, dozens of leagues worldwide | Decades of results; bookmaker prices for about two decades | "Private individuals only, NOT commercial or data training products using automated bots/scrapers/AI" | Confirmed at the source |
| oddswarehouse.com | Paid, bought once per file | Static CSV file | Narrower: a few US and European leagues, tennis | Sold by season | None stated; "investment" marketing framing is promotion, not a promise | Not fully confirmed |
| oddsportal.com | Free to browse | Web archive only, no export | Very wide: most major sports and more | No fixed range published; usable well back | Built for manual reading; full terms not read here, treat as lookup only | Not fully confirmed |
| covers.com/sportsoddshistory | Free to browse | Editorial archive, no export | Strong on North American sports: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL | Decades deep for US sports, thin outside them | Same caveat as OddsPortal: built for reading, full terms not read here | Not fully confirmed |
"Confirmed at the source" means the provider's own page was read directly. "Not fully confirmed" covers the two archives whose full terms were not read, the-odds-api.com's coverage and pricing (pending a recheck), and the oddswarehouse.com price, seen mid-promotion: read any price above as an order of magnitude, never a quote.
The part a subscription hides
An API subscription is not something you keep the way you keep a CSV file bought once and saved: it is access you keep renting, and if you let the plan lapse, the whole timestamped range you already built a model on disappears with it, even though you paid for that exact history once already.
Do you even need any of this?
Maybe not. If the real goal is checking whether your own stakes already beat the market's closing price, skip the search above and go straight to how your own bets stack up against the close.
A raw price still needs work once you have it
A historical price is not a fair probability: every bookmaker bakes in a margin. Stripping it out is a separate step, one the site's margin calculator runs on any market, with the reasoning on the page about finding value bets, which already covers the paid scanners that automate it.
Frequently asked questions
Where can I check historical betting odds for free?
A free, browsable archive: OddsPortal's results pages or Covers.com's sportsoddshistory section, no account. Both are a lookup counter, not a source to pull from at volume.
Is there a free historical odds database for football?
Yes: football-data.co.uk, CSV files with results back decades and bookmaker prices for recent seasons. Its terms restrict that to private individuals, so a spreadsheet fits and a scraper does not.
What's the difference between a historical odds API and a downloadable odds database?
A database is a file you buy once and keep. An API is a live connection you keep paying for, returning snapshots timestamped to the minute. Pick the file for a one-off, the API for an updating feed.
Can I use historical betting odds data for a commercial or automated project?
Only where the source allows it, and most free ones do not. football-data.co.uk excludes commercial products and automated bots, scrapers or AI outright. Paid vendors sell a licence built for that use.
Do betting brokers or bookmakers offer a public odds API?
Not among the operators covered on this site. MadMarket rules out scraping and automated copying; FairExchange, through Sportmarket, bans API robots outright. An API attributed to BetInAsia turns up in older tests, but reports disagree on whether this still exists.
Can I export my own betting history, and is that the same as market odds data?
You can, and it is not the same thing. Sportmarket lets you export your own analytics as CSV or Excel, a record of what you staked and won, not market prices.
Do I need historical odds data at all, or just closing line value on my own bets?
Most people asking this actually want the second thing. Closing line value on your own bets needs only your betting history, not an archive.