Using sparse-checkout by itself will still download the entire repository and its complete history into .git. If you additionally use the "partial clone" featur

Using sparse-checkout by itself will still download the entire repository and its complete history into .git. If you additionally use the "partial clone" feature, then you can restrict what gets downloaded and stored in .git as well - it will download only the objects that are needed for your selected directories (along with their complete history). On big repositories with long history this might still be too much data, so you might also want to use the "shallow clone" feature (via the --depth flag) to restrict how much history you download.