How Should I Handle Live Football API Updates Without Excessive Polling?

I am integrating football data for fixtures, scores, match events and statistics, and I need a clean way to process live updates. Polling every match endpoint every few seconds may become expensive when many matches are live at once. For example, 30 simultaneous games could create a large number of requests within a short period. For developers who have built live-score, sports analytics or football applications, what works best in production? Do you poll a single endpoint for all live matches, switch to individual match polling only when games go live, or use WebSockets where available? I would also like to know how you handle caching, changed fields and different update intervals for pre-match, live and finished games. The goal is to keep latency low without wasting API requests.

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