Anyone who went to any live sport over the holidays, has booked a skiing holiday recently, or just renewed their gym membership will not be shocked to hear the global sports industry is doing quite well.
But now, thanks to a landmark report by the World Economic Forum (WEF), we know it is about the same size as Canada’s total economy (which is not a joke at Canada’s expense, by the way, as it has the 10th largest economy on the planet). It is estimated to rise from $2.3trillion last year to $3.7tn in 2030.
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A collaboration with management consultancy firm Oliver Wyman, ‘Sports for People and Planet’ was published on Thursday, and it represents the first serious attempt to tot up the myriad revenue streams that make up Worldwide Sport Inc’s bottom line and estimate how big the sprawling conglomerate can get by 2050.
The Athletic has picked 10 of the most arresting numbers in the 40-page document, which is based on conversations with 125 organisations and a literature review of more than 130 sources.
1.8
According to a 2025 report by international sustainability experts Global Footprint Network, humanity is currently consuming the Earth’s natural resources at a rate 1.8 times faster than the planet can regenerate. This suggests we are taking a similar approach to our own survival as all those teams that spend more than 100 per cent of their revenues on players’ wages.
The Global Commission on the Economics of Water believes demand for fresh water is expected to exceed supply by 40 per cent by 2030. Dyeing and finishing textiles can consume more than 100 litres of water per kilogram of fabric, while poor wastewater treatment leads to pollutants entering local water systems. These issues are particularly acute in Asia, where 80 per cent of the world’s sporting goods are currently manufactured.
Thankfully, some companies are already taking steps. Puma, for example, introduced a water roadmap in 2021, cutting its water usage by 2.4 million cubic metres by 2023, equivalent to the annual consumption of 50,000 people. While in 2023, Adidas hit its target of sourcing 99 per cent of its polyester from recycled content.
Sports governing bodies can help here, too. According to a 2023 report by Turkish sustainable investment platform Etkiyap, 325 million balls are produced annually, most of which are not used for very long. That is 20,000 tonnes of non-degradable waste every year. Could tennis authorities, for example, insist on a more durable design that uses easily recyclable material?
(Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)
10
With snow cover declining across the world, the Winter Olympic Games might be running out of hosts. Last month, International Ski and Snowboard Federation president Johan Eliasch suggested rotating them between six to eight venues. “Climate change could become an existential threat,” he said. “The only logical way to bring costs down to reasonable levels is to have a rotation scheme.”
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This tallies with the World Economic Forum’s view that, on current trends, only 10 countries will have the conditions and resources to host the Winter Olympics and Paralympics by 2040. It should probably go without saying that making snow with large quantities of water and energy is not an ideal solution to a problem caused by climate change.
17
Most interestingly, the report warns that almost a fifth of the sector’s potential growth is threatened by climate change and rising physical inactivity. It has some suggestions as to how the industry can mitigate those risks, but makes it clear that they will require the urgent attention of governments, industry leaders, and us, the fans, tracksuit-clad amateurs and sports tourists who keep the proverbial cash registers ringing.
The good news is this report came out four days before the start of WEF’s 56th annual meeting in Davos, the swish Swiss ski resort that attracts world leaders and chief executives for a week of comparing lanyards, collecting tote bags, and digesting melted cheese.
FIFA Peace Prize winner Donald Trump is attending this year, which guarantees that FIFA president Gianni Infantino will be in town, too, although, to be fair, he comes every year to remind everyone that the football/soccer economy is about the same size as Qatar’s and deserves as much respect.
It is unlikely that Trump will come to the session WEF and Oliver Wyman are putting on to discuss their report, as it contains 17 references to climate change, something he said in September at the United Nations General Assembly is the “greatest con job ever”.
31.3
According to a 2024 report by British medical journal The Lancet, 31.3 per cent of adults around the world do not meet recommended guidelines for physical activity. Insufficient activity is failing to do more than 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week. The Lancet’s research was based on 507 surveys across 163 countries.
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The World Health Organisation believes this number could reach 35 per cent by 2030. If this happens, it would equate to 800 million fewer active adults worldwide than initially anticipated, an obvious concern for the likes of Decathlon, Foot Locker, and Sports Direct, but also national governments’ strained healthcare budgets.
This is why the WEF report describes climate change and inactivity as “interconnected systemic risks… that reinforce one another through feedback loops that weaken participation, disrupt supply chains, undermine investment confidence, and erode long-term revenue potential”. So get up and get outside!
Thankfully, there is a partial solution to the problem of declining activity: getting women as active as men. According to a 2025 report by the Council of Europe, girls and women comprise only 37 per cent of sports participants in the European Union. The gap is narrower in North America, with female participation accounting for 40 per cent of the total in the U.S. and 45 per cent in Canada.
The continued growth of women’s football should help here, as will the International Olympic Committee’s efforts to bring in full gender parity in terms of events and participants at the Olympic Games. And once we have closed the gender participation gap, we can concentrate on giving people with disabilities better access to sport, as they are currently twice as likely to be inactive as the able-bodied.
81
They may not have run on time, but Germany’s trains delivered a lot of football fans to matches at the European Championship in 2024. With local trains and trams free on matchdays for ticket holders and Deutsche Bahn, one of the tournament’s sponsors, offering discounted prices for intercity travel, 81 per cent of fans used public transport to get to the stadiums at the tournament.
This, of course, is not that unusual in Europe. For English Premier League games, 75 per cent of fans either walk, get a supporters’ coach, or use public transport to get to the stadium, while 45,000 F1 fans arrived at the Dutch Grand Prix in 2023 by bicycle.
Cyclists view a banner supporting Max Verstappen in Zandvoort in 2023 (Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP via Getty Images)
But this is not the case in the U.S., where only a few cities have European-style metro networks. And even in cities with buses, trams and subways, the stadiums are often beyond the network’s reach. As a result, only five per cent of NFL fans use public transport on matchdays.
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In one of the report’s more whimsical moments, its authors point out that NFL teams could cut their average CO2 emissions per fan by 30 per cent if they were able to match the EPL’s transport mix.
300
This is the number of major stadiums Deloitte thinks will be built worldwide over the next decade, with half of them in emerging economies.
The challenge for the industry is to build these stadiums as sustainably as possible, while also making them resilient to climate change. A 2025 report by Football for Future, Common Goal, and Jupiter Intelligence claimed 14 of the 16 stadiums that will host World Cup games in the U.S., Canada and Mexico this summer will be significantly impacted by extreme heat by 2050. Cooling systems and heat-reflective surfaces will become standard in many parts of the world.
On a more optimistic note, the report is encouraged by the development of what it calls “outdoor sporting precincts”, with China opening 100 of them between now and 2030. Ideally, cities would not need to build anything new at all, as they should have been built with enough green and blue spaces for their residents to stretch their legs, touch grass and splash about. But in the real world, Paris had to spend $1.6billion on its sewage infrastructure to make the River Seine safe for swimming again at the Olympics in 2024.
951
This number was so shocking when I read it, I had to read it three more times to make sure I understood it. According to campaign group Green Football, 100,000 tonnes of sportswear ends up in UK landfill sites every year. This is equivalent to 951 football shirts each minute.
Green Football worked with partners including the BBC’s Match of the Day, the Met Office, and The Salvation Army to encourage people to use their kits a little longer, recycle or repurpose them, or just give them to someone else.
And hats off to the football team known as the Hatters, as Luton Town have teamed up with sustainable sportswear brand Reflo to create a first-team kit that is entirely made from recycled polyester and is designed to be easily recycled once you have worn holes in it.
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$2.35bn
There is an old adage in business that “revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is king”, and it crops up from time to time in LinkedIn debates about the financial health of women’s professional sport. Because while there is no dispute that women athletes are getting more airtime and column inches than ever before, women’s sport is still losing money, with most women’s teams subsidised by their male colleagues.
But, on the flip side, there is not much profit in men’s pro sport outside North America at the moment, and it has had a decades-long head start on women’s sport in most countries.
In terms of revenue, women’s professional sport is demonstrably growing very fast. According to Deloitte, its total projected global earnings should have hit $2.35bn in 2025, more than triple the figure for 2022.
Basketball and football account for 80 per cent of these revenues, but cricket’s Women’s Premier League in India has just started its fourth season, having held a blockbuster player auction in November.
$672billion
We spent $672bn on accommodation, food and travel while going to watch or play sport last year, according to the report. This does not include any expenditure on tickets or entry fees, as those costs are accounted for in the professional sport and participatory sport columns, respectively.
Having stalled during the Covid-19 pandemic, sport-related travel is booming again and is forecast to provide 60 per cent of the total industry’s revenue growth between now and 2030. Sports-related tourism accounted for 10 per cent of the global travel industry’s total spend in 2025. Having seen the price of hotels at this summer’s men’s World Cup, I would expect records to be broken.
$8.8trillion
This is what the report’s authors think the global sports economy could be worth in 2050 in terms of total revenue. That is double the UK’s current gross domestic product (the world’s sixth largest economy).
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According to the report, the total global revenues of sport last year cleared $2.3trillion, which represents a compound annual growth rate since 2016 of seven per cent. Not bad, but the next 25 years could be even better, with the authors predicting annual growth rates of 10 per cent.
The report breaks the global sports economy into four core industries — professional sport, participatory sport, sporting goods and sport tourism — with five much smaller “connected industries”.
However, hitting $8.8trillion by 2050 is far from a given. On the contrary. The report’s key message is that the headwinds mentioned above could cost the industry $1.6trillion in lost revenue by the middle of this century. That is a lot of unsold tennis balls, tickets and trainers.