templatestoolssports

Build a Daily Sports Dashboard for Content Planning (Template + Tools)

UUnknown

2026-02-08

10 min read

Aggregate injuries, fixtures and FPL stats into a simple daily dashboard to speed content planning and automate publish priorities.

When last-minute injuries and fixture chaos steal your content day — here’s a dashboard that fixes that

Creators, influencers and small sports publishers: your calendar doesn’t need to be hostage to late team news, surprise double-headers or sudden FPL ownership swings. Build a simple daily sports dashboard that pulls injury reports, fixture lists and Fantasy Premier League (FPL) stats into one view, scores story opportunities, and automates alerts and publish slots. Below I give a ready-to-use template, recommended tools (from free to enterprise), automation recipes and a step-by-step build you can complete in a day.

Why this matters now (2026 lens)

Short answer: data is faster and platforms reward speed. In late 2025 and early 2026 we saw two trends accelerate: real-time sports data pipelines became more accessible to creators via public APIs and cheaper streaming tools, and AI summarization made quick-turn press conference and injury-analysis content practical to produce at scale. That means creators who aggregate accurate signals (injuries, fixtures, FPL ownership/activity) into one daily snapshot win the attention race and monetize predictable content series.

What this dashboard solves

Overwhelm: single-pane view replaces 5 tabs and 3 apps.
Speed-to-publish: automated alerts reduce reaction time to breaking team news.
Topic prioritization: a scoring model surfaces the highest-impact content (captaincy advice, injury explainers, differential pick).
Consistency: recurring data pulls turn one-off research into an editorial habit.

What you’ll get in this guide

A practical, plug-and-play dashboard template schema (columns and formulas).
Tool tiers: from free (Google Sheets + Apps Script) to pro (Airtable + Make + BigQuery).
Automation recipes (IFTTT/Zapier/Make/n8n) and sample Apps Script / IMPORTJSON snippets to fetch FPL and fixture data.
Content scoring model and scheduling rules you can copy.

High-level architecture (pick a stack)

Start small; scale later. Here are three practical stacks depending on your budget and technical comfort.

Light (fast, cheap): Google Sheets + Apps Script + Notion/Trello

Data ingest: Google Sheets using IMPORTJSON/Apps Script to call APIs (FPL, football-data.org, BBC RSS).
Transforms: formulas & pivot tables in Sheets.
Editorial: Notion or Trello linked via Zapier to push tasks and publish schedules.
Alerting: Email + mobile push (Pushbullet/Slack webhook).

Medium (recommended for creators with 1–3 staff): Airtable + Make + Google Drive

Data ingest: Airtable fetches via Make scenarios from APIs and RSS feeds.
Editorial: Airtable grid + Calendar views, plus content blocks for assets.
Automation: Make triggers create drafts in Google Docs, schedule posts, send Slack alerts.

Pro (publishers / scale): Data warehouse (BigQuery) + n8n + CMS integration

Data ingest: streaming fixtures and event data into BigQuery using scheduled ETL.
Transforms: SQL models produce daily summary tables consumed by dashboard UI (Data Studio / Looker / Superset).
Automation: n8n or custom services push alerts, create CMS drafts, and feed social scheduler APIs. For production-grade LLM summarization and tools, follow a solid CI/CD and governance path.

Step-by-step build: a one-day roadmap

Decide your signal set (60 minutes). You need: fixtures, injuries/team news, FPL key stats (ownership, expected points, transfers in/out), betting odds movement (optional), and your historical engagement metrics for scoring.
Wire the dashboard schema (30 minutes). Create the columns listed in the template below.
Connect data sources (2–3 hours). Use free APIs and RSS; deploy quick scripts or Make flows to populate the sheet/DB.
Build the scoring model (60 minutes). Add formulas to rank stories and assign publish priority.
Set alerts and automate tasks (60–90 minutes). Push high-priority items to your editorial tool as tasks/drafts and configure mobile alerts for 30-min windows before kickoff.
Test & iterate (30–60 minutes). Run the dashboard for a few game cycles and refine thresholds (e.g., ownership delta that triggers a “must-publish” alert).

Dashboard template schema (copy these columns)

Use this as a Google Sheet or Airtable base. Add a tab for raw API dumps and another for the daily summary (the dashboard).

Date — match date (YYYY-MM-DD)
Fixture — Home v Away
Kickoff (UTC)
Competition
Injury flags — comma-separated (e.g., "Player X (out), Player Y (doubtful)")
Key FPL stat: ownership%
Transfers in / out (24h)
Expected points (xP) — from FPL model or third-party
Impact score — formula (see below)
Suggested content angle — automatic tag (captaincy, injury explainer, differential pick)
Publish priority (1–5)
Platform — YouTube, Threads, Instagram, newsletter
Publish slot — scheduled date/time
Assets — links to scripts, graphics, clips
Status — Idea / Draft / Scheduled / Published

Sample formulas & scoring

Use a weighted score to surface priorities. Example formula (pseudo):

Score = (InjuryImpact * 35) + (OwnershipDelta_24h * 30) + (FixtureImportance * 20) + (xP_Delta * 15)

Where:

InjuryImpact: 0–1 (0=no change, 1=star ruled out)
OwnershipDelta_24h: normalized to 0–1 (big swings >2% become significant)
FixtureImportance: 0–1 (rivalry or top-table match = 1)
xP_Delta: change in expected points for key players

Then map Score to Publish priority: 0–20 = low (5), 20–50 = medium (3), 50+ = high (1). Adjust thresholds based on your engagement history.

APIs and data sources (practical list)

Pick a combination of official and community endpoints.

FPL (unofficial): fantasy.premierleague.com/api/ — endpoints provide players, fixtures, team news and live event data. Reliable for ownership and transfers-in/out.
football-data.org: fixtures, competitions and basic team data (free tier available).
BBC Sport / Club sites: team news and press conference updates via RSS or scraping (respect robots.txt and copyright).
API-Football / SportsOpenData / Sportradar / Stats Perform: commercial feeds for richer event data, if available and budget permits.
Twitter/X / Threads: use as a signal source for manager quotes or breaking updates; streaming via API or third-party monitoring tools.

Quick automation recipes (step-by-step)

Recipe A — Low-cost: Pull FPL ownership & transfers into Google Sheets

Create a Google Sheet and add an Apps Script (Extensions > Apps Script).
Use this simple fetch function (replace sheet/range as needed):

function fetchFPL() {
  const url = 'https://fantasy.premierleague.com/api/bootstrap-static/';
  const res = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, {muteHttpExceptions: true});
  const data = JSON.parse(res.getContentText());
  const players = data.elements;
  const sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActive().getSheetByName('raw_fpl');
  sheet.clear();
  sheet.appendRow(['id','name','team','now_cost','selected_by_percent','minutes','total_points']);
  players.forEach(p => sheet.appendRow([p.id, p.web_name, p.team_code, p.now_cost, p.selected_by_percent, p.minutes, p.total_points]));
}

Schedule this script via Triggers to run every 6 hours (or hourly on matchdays).

Recipe B — Medium: Push a high-priority alert to Slack and create a Notion task

Use Make (Integromat) to watch your Google Sheet or Airtable base for new rows where Publish priority = 1.
Create modules: Slack > send message; Notion > create page in "Breaking News" DB with template content and assigned author.
Include buttons or checkboxes in Notion to progress the item from Draft to Published.

Content play ideas tied to dashboard signals

If a captaincy pick loses a 30%+ ownership overnight: publish a short-form video (30–60s) explaining the new captain differential, why it matters and a quick stat comparison.
If a top player is ruled out 48 hours before kickoff: long-form explainer + X thread analyzing replacement picks and lineup predictions.
If multiple key players are doubtful on same day: a 5-minute newsletter that bundles injury analysis and top differentials — optimized for email opens.

Example: How one creator used this dashboard (anonymized)

Case: "Emily," a solo football content creator. She built a Sheets-Airtable-Notion stack. By scoring items and prioritizing based on ownership delta and injury impact, she trimmed content planning time from 5 hours to 90 minutes on fixture days and published a short video within 45 minutes of a key player being ruled out. The result: consistent early-morning posts that doubled her engagement rate on match previews across two months. (This example is illustrative — your mileage depends on niche, audience and execution.)

Advanced strategies (2026-forward)

1. Use lightweight ML to predict engagement

Feed your historical piece-level metrics (clicks, watch time, shares) with the dashboard signals to a simple regression model (Google Cloud AutoML or a Python scikit-learn notebook). Predict likely reach and refine the Score weightings automatically. For production and governance patterns as you move from prototype to full toolchain see guidance on CI/CD for LLM-built tools.

2. Auto-summarize press conferences with LLMs

In 2025 many creators began using small fine-tuned models to turn press conference transcripts into bullet point team news. API-driven summarization can create first-draft lines for stories ("Player X doubtful for Sunday; manager noted fitness concern in hamstring"). Always human-edit and cite your source. Consider the impact of large-model provider updates when selecting an API—see commentary on why major LLM bets matter for creators here.

3. Real-time micro-content pipelines

Use streaming APIs to trigger one-off micro-content: if a starter is ruled out within 60 minutes of kickoff, auto-create a 15–30s clip template with text overlay for Instagram Reels / YouTube Shorts and queue it in your scheduler. Pay attention to live-stream conversion and delivery latency best practices so micro-clips arrive when your audience is still engaged.

Compliance, reliability and best practices

Respect data terms: commercial data feeds often require licensing. The FPL unofficial endpoints are commonly used for fan content but verify current terms.
Stability: cache raw API responses — don’t rely on live scraping for critical alerts. For resilient ingestion patterns and architecture guidance see resilient architectures.
Attribution: link to original club announcements and trusted outlets when publishing injury news.
Quality control: set a 2-step verification for anything labeled "Breaking" — a human should confirm before publish.

Checklist: what to build today

Copy the dashboard template into Google Sheets or Airtable.
Deploy the FPL fetch Apps Script and run it once.
Add a BBC/club RSS feed to your raw data tab.
Create a Publish priority column and implement the scoring formula.
Set up one automation: Slack or email alert for priority = 1.
Run a dry test during the next fixture window and refine thresholds.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Too many signals: start with 3 — injuries, fixtures, FPL ownership — then add odds or heatmaps after the model proves value.
Over-automation: always keep a human-in-the-loop for publishing sensitive news.
Ignoring timezone issues: store kickoff in UTC and convert when scheduling posts for local audiences.

Templates & resources (what to copy right now)

Google Sheets starter template (columns listed above) — copy and add Apps Script fetch.
Airtable base with Calendar view and automations for Make/Zapier.
Sample Make scenarios: FPL fetch > Airtable upsert; Injury alert > Slack + Notion task.
Snippet library: Apps Script FPL fetch (above), IMPORTJSON helper, and example SQL for BigQuery daily summary.

Final checklist before you go live

Are your data pulls scheduled for matchday frequency (hourly) and non-matchday frequency (6–12 hours)?
Do you have a prioritized publish queue for the next 48 hours?
Is someone assigned as the last check for breaking injury items?
Is your publish schedule aligned to the platforms’ peak times?

Wrap-up: move from reactive to editorially strategic

In 2026, the edge for creators is not just who breaks the news first — it’s who turns timely data into a consistent, prioritized content rhythm. A daily sports dashboard that aggregates injuries, fixtures and FPL stats gives you that rhythm. Start with the light stack and evolve to a pro pipeline when the ROI is clear. Use the scoring model to focus energy where it moves audience and revenue.

Call to action

Ready to build? Download the Google Sheets starter template and a one-click Make scenario I use to fetch FPL stats and push alerts (free). Try a 7-day Dashboard Challenge: implement the dashboard, run it for seven matchdays, and measure time saved and engagement lift. Want the template link or walkthrough? Sign up for my templates pack and a 20-minute onboarding call to get your first dashboard live this week.

Tip: Start with one reliable source of team news + FPL ownership. If your alerts are accurate, the rest of the pipeline becomes a multiplier.

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Senior editor and content strategist. Writing about technology, design, and the future of digital media. Follow along for deep dives into the industry's moving parts.