Few people know this, but in every single last polla, entering the scores for the matches was a manual process. When I tell this to people, they find it hard to believe.

It wasn’t that terrible. A few friends volunteered to help and were given special access to do that. And it was almost guaranteed that at least one of us was watching every match anyway. No big deal.

But of course, beyond the manual work, it was always a technical challenge for me to be able to automate it. In 2022 I got very close, but didn’t quite finish it.

I am happy to say that for the all-new, microservices-based Polla 2026, Automatic Score Updates functionality was just pushed to the server!

I am using football-data.org to as the data source. The implementation is as simple and stateless as I could make it. Seems right.

Of course, the big problem is that I cannot test it for real before the FIFA World Cup starts. And once it starts, should anything goes wrong, I won’t be able to do anything about it until at least several hours later.

Well, I will be able to pause it, as you can see in the screenshot. This is why I added the ability to pause it.

Hope it goes well. 🤞