League Not Found

[Robert-litts]

Good morning,

Is anyone getting a league "not found" issue with older leagues (2017 or earlier)? I'm wondering if its something on my end, but used the league ID from the tests as well as my own and it doesn't seem to be recognizing my LeagueID for those years.

@cwendt94 I saw you committed #649 which referenced a league from 2017, were you running into similar issues?

Did ESPN purge data from 2018 and prior?

[vibraslap3]

Same issue here, trying to get 2024 data for a league that's been active since before 2010. Getting "League ###### does not exist". I haven't changed my code since last season, and I've confirmed my league ID, espn s2 and swid are all accurate.

[Robert-litts]

I saw on another Fantasy Football project there was a note about more API changes, stating that S2 is required for API calls. I think that is odd as i have been using my valid S2 for all my requests and still get the same error.

@vibraslap3 A few questions for your league:

1. Is your league still active? (If it is still active, is any historical info available on the ESPN website?)
2. Is your league public?
3. Are you getting the error for any other years other than 2024?
4. Do you get the same error if you run the following: curl "https://lm-api-reads.fantasy.espn.com/apis/v3/games/ffl/leagueHistory/LEAGUE_ID?seasonId=2015&view=mTeam" -H "Cookie: espn_s2=YOUR_COOKIE_HERE;"

[vibraslap3]

1. Yes - I can see back to 2018. (it seems ESPN recently deleted some history, it used to go back to 2012)
2. No
3. No... Wait... What?

So just now I went to answer your post and tested my script, starting with 2024. Failure, same as before.
line 61, in checkRequestStatus raise ESPNInvalidLeague(f"League {self.league_id} does not exist") espn_api.requests.espn_requests.ESPNInvalidLeague: League 684*** does not exist

So I change to 2023, and it works! Try 2024 again, and it ALSO works???

So I guess my problem is solved. If you run into this, try getting league data for a prior year first? Odd behavior.

[Robert-litts]

Interesting, glad you're able to get something. But just to go back to the original point of my issue here, you are unable to access any data prior to 2018, either via API or on the website, correct?

I recently ran a sampling of a few hundred random league IDs testing between 2010-2015 and not one is successful. To me, this means either that data is either all gone or all set to private (requiring S2).

Mine is no longer accessible at all before 2018.

[vibraslap3]

I think they did a data purge of everything before 2018, my league's was definitely available as late as early this year. I remember looking it up after the super bowl.

Also the plot thickens, I get the same error "league does not exist" when I try to use league.recent_activity, any size query.

Other commands like league.draft work from the same connection however.

[dtcarls]

If memory serves, in 2018 ESPN did a pretty major overhaul of their API so results may vary using this library for prior to that.

[vibraslap3]

Should I open a separate issue for the activity data problem? Seems unrelated at its core to this issue, but they share they same error output.

[Robert-litts]

@vibraslap3 I recommend you do, since this issue is specifically dealing with data availability prior to 2018.

[vibraslap3]

Actually, I think the issues are more closely related than we thought.

Past activity is no longer available for my league. The most recent activity is all from post April 2025. I know this was not true in the past, you used to be able to see activity stretching back years.

I think this data has been deleted by ESPN. I think all league data for years prior to 2018 has been deleted from ESPN. I think neither of our failures are issues with this API wrapper, and are a result of ESPN's opaque data custodial practices.

I recommend this issue be closed as it is not a result of a bug within this repository.

[Robert-litts]

I suspect you're right, and unfortunately what i had feared. I was hoping this might uncover a change in the API that we could fix, but it's not looking that way.

I'll probably move this to a discussion topic instead.

[dchiado]

I don't think ESPN deleted the data. They definitely put pre-2018 data behind the s2 authentication and maybe changed the URLs, but my league started in 2005 and I'm still able to get to the old data using the espn_s2 header and this URL.

https://lm-api-reads.fantasy.espn.com/apis/v3/games/ffl/leagueHistory/<LEAGUE_ID>?seasonId=2009&view=mStandings

I'm not really familiar with this library, but I have my own app to track my leagues history and was able to get 2005-2017 data very recently.

[vibraslap3]

Hitting that API for my league returns this for any year prior to 2018. This reflects what I currently see on ESPN's website, nothing prior to 2018. It previously showed data back to at least 2012.

{"messages":["Not Found"],"details":[{"message":"Not Found","shortMessage":"Not Found","resolution":null,"type":"GENERAL_NOT_FOUND","metaData":null}]}

I'm not sure why my league's history was deleted and not yours, or what other factors are at play, but it does seem to me that this is a pure data problem regardless.

[arjunghelani]

I am getting League not found when trying to run league.recent_activity(). is it possible to get trades from previous seasons?

[vibraslap3]

I tried very hard this past weekend to pull trades from the ESPN api via transactions but no matter what I did I was not getting a complete list of all trades. Has anyone else tried working with this?

[Robert-litts]

@vibraslap3 Can you provide some more detail on what you were running and what errors you were seeing?

@dchiado Understand you aren't using this project, but are you using Python? Since you seem to still be reporting access to pre-2018 data, despite others not having it, just wondering what is different on your end and how recent you pulled the data. As I mentioned earlier, after February 2025 was when my pre-2018 data became inaccessible.