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How many people attend professional sporting events globally?
Hi there! Thanks for asking about the number of people attending professional sporting events around the world, segmented by sport. The short version is that after searching extensively through market research reports, industry intelligence, trusted media sites, and official attendance records, I've determined that the information you requested is not publicly available because attendance figures are not compiled by sport, but rather are usually listed per event or per league. However, I was able to learn recent attendance figures for the top individual sports leagues. You will find a deep dive of my research and methodology below.
METHODOLOGY
After searching exhaustively, I was not able to find enough precompiled data with which to calculate segmented attendance at professional sporting events by sport. I began by looking for attendance figures per sport, both globally and by continent, but I was unable to find any such compiled data. I then looked for global statistics on total attendance at professional sporting events, without segmentation by sport, in hopes of using the relative popularity of each sport to calculate an estimated attendance figure per sport, but even total global attendance figures are not available.
The best available data I could find consists of attendance figures for the most-attended sports leagues, but this did not include enough leagues with which to compile full attendance figures for each sport. Furthermore, as not all professional sports are played in leagues (for instance, tennis), compiled league attendance figures fall far short of your request. While I was able to find a source that uses a statistics-based analysis to rank all sports according to global and country/region popularity, it does not use attendance figures in its calculations.
HELPFUL FINDINGS
While I could not find a direct answer to your question, I was able to gather some information about this topic that I think will be helpful for your project.
~Top 10 Most Attended Sports Leagues (2017)~
According to Sporting Intelligence's data on the most recent seasons, these are the top-10 most-attended sports leagues in the world, by total attendance:
~Top Sports by Attendance Across the 17 Most Popular Sports Leagues (2015)~
I was also about to find older data from Sporting Intelligence which gives a look at total attendance figures for the top 17 leagues in the 2014-2015 season. I have calculated the following rankings and attendance figures using the data provided in the last chart on this page:
1. Baseball - 96,598,973
2. Basketball - 21,905,470
3. Ice Hockey - 21,528,192
4. Gridiron (US+CA) Football - 19,654,807
5. Assoc. Football (soccer)- 72,667,912
6. Australian Football - 6,404,569
7. Cricket - 1,558,664
~Most Popular Sports in North America by Attendance (2015)~
According to Experian Data Quality, these are the top-five most-popular sports in North America, by average attendance in the 2014-2015 season, along with the most popular team per sport, by attendance:
~Top 100 Sports Globally According to Online Coverage (~2015)~
Biggest Global Sports is a website providing a statistics-based analysis of global sports popularity. These rankings are based on online coverage of the world's most-visited sports news websites, and are weighted based on both population and wealth of countries from which visits originated in order to produce an estimate of the "biggest" global sports. I thought this analysis might prove interesting for your market sizing, as it grants larger, wealthier countries more weight than smaller, poorer nations. While you can view the full top 100 list here, I'll list the top 10 for you below:
~Research on Factors Affecting Sports Attendance (2014)~
I found an interesting paper published in Advances in Sport Management Research Journal which reviews published studies on attendance of professional sporting events. Without knowing more about your specific business, I can't speak to which parts of this research might be most applicable for you, but there is a wealth of information contained within this paper. A few key highlights:
- Only 25% of variance in attendance is due to team performance, and marketing efforts can boost attendance despite poor team performance.
- At the highest levels of competition in the largest market sizes, neither winning percentage nor market size are accurate predictors of attendance.
- Attendance increases when games are scheduled later in the evening, on weekends, and at the end of a season, while attendance decreases when games are scheduled in the afternoon.
POSSIBLE CONTINUED RESEARCH
In understanding what types of information are, and are not, publicly available on this topic, I can suggest a few other routes you might be interested in researching:
-Given that there are publications of attendance figures for specific teams and leagues, you could look into total global attendance figures per each individual sport, keeping in mind that league-based sports (such as football, soccer, baseball, hockey, rugby, cricket, etc.) will have the most robust data with which to make these calculations.
-You could also look at market size per sport per country/region. For research along these lines, you could dive into, for instance, total attendance of both major and minor baseball in North America, or total attendance of association football (soccer) in Europe.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up, after searching extensively through market research reports, industry intelligence, trusted media sites, and official attendance records, a direct answer to your question is not publicly available because there are no precompiled statistics on total global attendance of professional sporting events. However, I learned about the most-attended sports leagues in the world, calculated total global attendance by sport for the most-attended sports leagues, found the most popular sports in North America based on attendance, discovered an analysis of the top sports globally based on online news coverage, and located a review of research on factors affecting attendance at professional sporting events. If you’d like to continue research on any of the other topics I’ve outlined above, just let us know!
Thanks for using Wonder!