Turn each week's football fixtures into a venue staffing plan

Every Monday at 8am, look ahead at the coming week of football fixtures and turn them into a match day trading plan for my bar. Put the matches that matter on our shared venue calendar and finish with one Slack summary my managers can build the rota from.

Start by resolving the leagues I follow. Use the API-Sports "List Leagues and Cups" operation to look up my leagues by name and get back their league IDs and current season. Seasons are four digit years, and for a league that spans two calendar years the starting year is the one to use. Resolve all of my leagues in as few calls as possible and reuse the IDs for the rest of the run.

Then pull the week's fixtures with "List Fixtures (Live, By Date, League, or Team)", using a from and to date range that covers Monday through Sunday of the coming week, scoped to those league IDs and the current season. Always pass my venue time zone on the fixtures call. Without it the kickoff times come back in UTC and the peak slot judgement will be wrong.

Also pull "Get Standings" once per league for the current season, so you can judge which matches actually matter instead of treating every game the same.

Rank every fixture into a demand tier of high, medium or low. Weigh league prestige, whether it is a local derby or a long standing rivalry, whether it is a clash between two sides near the top of the table or a genuine relegation six pointer, and whether the kickoff lands in a peak slot. Treat a weekday evening kickoff and a weekend afternoon or evening kickoff as peak, and a weekday daytime kickoff as low regardless of who is playing, because the room will be empty. Keep a short reason for each rating so a manager can sanity check it.

Turn each tier into a suggested staffing level using my baseline cover for that day plus an uplift per tier, for example a high tier match adds several extra bar and floor staff and a medium tier match adds a couple. If two fixtures overlap on the same day, plan the cover for the day as a whole rather than double counting the same shift.

For every high and medium fixture, create a Google Calendar event on our shared venue calendar using "Create Event". Title it with the tier and the fixture, for example "HIGH: Arsenal vs Tottenham (Premier League)". Set the start to the local kickoff time and the end about two and a half hours later so the event covers the match and the trade either side of it. In the description put the demand tier and the one line reason for it, the suggested staffing level, and one promo idea that fits that specific match. Do not create events for low tier fixtures, they would only clutter the calendar.

Finish by posting a single Slack message to our managers channel. List the week's match days in chronological order, and under each day give the kickoff time, the fixture, the competition, the demand tier and the suggested cover for that day, then close with the total suggested cover across the week. It should read as something the rota can be built straight from, so keep it scannable and post it as one message rather than one message per match.

Keep the API-Sports calls tight, because the free plan allows only 100 requests per day. Aim for one leagues lookup, one fixtures pull per league for the whole date range, and one standings call per league. Do not fetch per fixture extras such as lineups, odds, head to head or match statistics, none of them change the staffing decision.

Handle API-Sports responses carefully. It returns errors inside the errors field of a normal HTTP 200 response with an empty response array, so inspect the errors field rather than trusting the status code, and surface a clear message in Slack if the key is invalid or the daily quota is spent. A result count of zero is a valid no data answer, not a failure. If the coming week genuinely has no fixtures in my leagues, skip the calendar entirely and post a short note saying it is a quiet week with no extra match day cover needed.