What is the best way to get football league table updated automatically?

I've read some opinions that people use APIs and other are just php parsing the data. I want to hear some more opinions before I choose how to continue and what to use. I want to get the Italian Serie A league table updated automatically on a website using WordPress, because it is a lot of work to do it manually each week. And I don't need more than 4-5 requests per day, so we are talking about something really simple. Also, if there is a WP plugin, that could also help. Thank you for your time and advices!

 

The problem with API's are they are most likely not licensed by the NFL but instead are either 1. Updated by an actual employee near real time OR 2. Fed directly by the originating source (NFL) OR 3. Scraped with a script using a public source fed by the originating source (NFL).
My initial ideal would be to write a PHP script that fetches information from the NFL site or Wikipedia.

 

I've done this a number of times, generally unless you want to pay licensing fees for an official API, you need to write a script to scrape and parse out scores each week. If you can find some xml or other data based score format, that's the easiest way. It may be possible to scrape a larger website, but they often are using ajax and other back end delivery methods that make it very difficult to get the data out.

 

I think I've found a free API so I can try with it. If it's not working, then I can scrape the data.

 

This link is the Italian Serie A Table in a format that you can easily scrape.
I'd just write a quick PHP script that scrapes what I need from this page.

The only downside is that every time this site changes, you'd have to change your script to match the new format.

 

select * from `xyz` where LOWER(`column`)=strtolower($foo);