Anyone who went to any stay sport over the holidays, has booked a snowboarding vacation just lately, or simply renewed their fitness center membership is not going to be shocked to listen to the global sports trade is doing fairly effectively.
But now, due to a landmark report by the World Economic Forum (WEF), we all know it’s about the similar measurement as Canada’s whole economy (which isn’t a joke at Canada’s expense, by the means, because it has the tenth largest economy on the planet). It is estimated to rise from $2.3trillion final 12 months to $3.7tn in 2030.
A collaboration with administration consultancy agency Oliver Wyman, ‘Sports for People and Planet’ was published on Thursday, and it represents the first severe try to tot up the myriad income streams that make up Worldwide Sport Inc’s backside line and estimate how massive the sprawling conglomerate can get by 2050.
The Athletic has picked 10 of the most arresting numbers in the 40-page doc, which relies on conversations with 125 organisations and a literature evaluation of greater than 130 sources.
1.8
According to a 2025 report by worldwide sustainability specialists Global Footprint Network, humanity is presently consuming the Earth’s pure sources at a charge 1.8 instances quicker than the planet can regenerate. This suggests we’re taking an identical strategy to our personal survival as all these groups that spend greater than 100 per cent of their revenues on gamers’ wages.
The Global Commission on the Economics of Water believes demand for recent water is predicted to exceed provide by 40 per cent by 2030. Dyeing and ending textiles can devour greater than 100 litres of water per kilogram of material, whereas poor wastewater remedy results in pollution coming into native water methods. These points are significantly acute in Asia, the place 80 per cent of the world’s sporting items are presently manufactured.
Thankfully, some firms are already taking steps. Puma, for instance, launched a water roadmap in 2021, reducing its water utilization by 2.4 million cubic metres by 2023, equal to the annual consumption of fifty,000 individuals. While in 2023, Adidas hit its goal of sourcing 99 per cent of its polyester from recycled content material.
Sports governing our bodies will help right here, too. According to a 2023 report by Turkish sustainable funding platform Etkiyap, 325 million balls are produced yearly, most of which aren’t used for very lengthy. That is 20,000 tonnes of non-degradable waste yearly. Could tennis authorities, for instance, insist on a extra sturdy design that makes use of simply recyclable materials?
(Saeed Khan/AFP through Getty Images)
10
With snow cowl declining throughout the world, the Winter Olympic Games could be operating out of hosts. Last month, International Ski and Snowboard Federation president Johan Eliasch advised rotating them between six to eight venues. “Climate change could become an existential threat,” he stated. “The only logical way to bring costs down to reasonable levels is to have a rotation scheme.”
This tallies with the World Economic Forum’s view that, on present developments, solely 10 international locations can have the situations and sources to host the Winter Olympics and Paralympics by 2040. It ought to in all probability go with out saying that making snow with giant portions of water and vitality shouldn’t be a super resolution to an issue attributable to local weather change.
17
Most apparently, the report warns that nearly a fifth of the sector’s potential development is threatened by local weather change and rising bodily inactivity. It has some options as to how the trade can mitigate these dangers, however makes it clear that they are going to require the pressing consideration of governments, trade leaders, and us, the followers, tracksuit-clad amateurs and sports vacationers who preserve the proverbial money registers ringing.
The excellent news is that this report got here out 4 days earlier than the begin of WEF’s 56th annual assembly in Davos, the swish Swiss ski resort that pulls world leaders and chief executives for every week of evaluating lanyards, amassing tote luggage, and digesting melted cheese.
FIFA Peace Prize winner Donald Trump is attending this 12 months, which ensures that FIFA president Gianni Infantino shall be on the town, too, though, to be honest, he comes yearly to remind everybody that the soccer/soccer economy is about the similar measurement as Qatar’s and deserves as a lot respect.
It is unlikely that Trump will come to the session WEF and Oliver Wyman are placing on to debate their report, because it incorporates 17 references to local weather change, one thing he stated 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 round the world don’t meet advisable tips for bodily exercise. Insufficient exercise is failing to do greater than 150 minutes of reasonable exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week. The Lancet’s analysis was primarily based on 507 surveys throughout 163 international locations.
The World Health Organisation believes this quantity might attain 35 per cent by 2030. If this occurs, it might equate to 800 million fewer energetic adults worldwide than initially anticipated, an apparent concern for the likes of Decathlon, Foot Locker, and Sports Direct, but additionally nationwide governments’ strained healthcare budgets.
This is why the WEF report describes local weather 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 stand up and get exterior!
Thankfully, there’s a partial resolution to the downside of declining exercise: getting girls as energetic as males. According to a 2025 report by the Council of Europe, women and girls comprise solely 37 per cent of sports contributors in the European Union. The hole is narrower in North America, with feminine participation accounting for 40 per cent of the whole in the U.S. and 45 per cent in Canada.
The continued development of girls’s soccer ought to assist right here, as will the International Olympic Committee’s efforts to usher in full gender parity by way of occasions and contributors at the Olympic Games. And as soon as we’ve got closed the gender participation hole, we will think about giving individuals with disabilities higher entry to sport, as they’re presently twice as prone to be inactive as the able-bodied.
81
They may not have run on time, however Germany’s trains delivered quite a lot of soccer followers to matches at the European Championship in 2024. With native trains and trams free on matchdays for ticket holders and Deutsche Bahn, considered one of the match’s sponsors, providing discounted costs for intercity journey, 81 per cent of followers used public transport to get to the stadiums at the match.
This, after all, shouldn’t be that uncommon in Europe. For English Premier League video games, 75 per cent of followers both stroll, get a supporters’ coach, or use public transport to get to the stadium, whereas 45,000 F1 followers arrived at the Dutch Grand Prix in 2023 by bicycle.
Cyclists view a banner supporting Max Verstappen in Zandvoort in 2023 (Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP through Getty Images)
But this isn’t the case in the U.S., the place just a few cities have European-style metro networks. And even in cities with buses, trams and subways, the stadiums are sometimes past the community’s attain. As a outcome, solely 5 per cent of NFL followers use public transport on matchdays.
In considered one of the report’s extra whimsical moments, its authors level out that NFL groups might minimize their common CO2 emissions per fan by 30 per cent in the event that they had been capable of match the EPL’s transport combine.
300
This is the variety of main stadiums Deloitte thinks shall be constructed worldwide over the subsequent decade, with half of them in rising economies.
The problem for the trade is to construct these stadiums as sustainably as attainable, whereas additionally making them resilient to local weather change. A 2025 report by Football for Future, Common Goal, and Jupiter Intelligence claimed 14 of the 16 stadiums that may host World Cup video games in the U.S., Canada and Mexico this summer time shall be considerably impacted by excessive warmth by 2050. Cooling methods and heat-reflective surfaces will develop into normal in lots of elements of the world.
On a extra optimistic word, the report is inspired by the growth of what it calls “outdoor sporting precincts”, with China opening 100 of them between now and 2030. Ideally, cities wouldn’t must construct something new in any respect, as they need to have been constructed with sufficient inexperienced and blue areas for his or her residents to stretch their legs, contact grass and splash about. But in the actual world, Paris needed to spend $1.6billion on its sewage infrastructure to make the River Seine safe for swimming again at the Olympics in 2024.
951
This quantity was so stunning once I learn it, I needed to learn it three extra instances to verify I understood it. According to marketing campaign group Green Football, 100,000 tonnes of sportswear results in UK landfill websites yearly. This is equal to 951 soccer shirts every minute.
Green Football labored with companions together with the BBC’s Match of the Day, the Met Office, and The Salvation Army to encourage individuals to make use of their kits a bit longer, recycle or repurpose them, or simply give them to another person.
And hats off to the soccer crew often called the Hatters, as Luton Town have teamed up with sustainable sportswear model Reflo to create a first-team equipment that’s totally comprised of recycled polyester and is designed to be simply recycled upon getting worn holes in it.
$2.35bn
There is an outdated adage in enterprise that “revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is king”, and it crops up every so often in LinkedIn debates about the monetary well being of girls’s skilled sport. Because whereas there isn’t any dispute that girls athletes are getting extra airtime and column inches than ever earlier than, girls’s sport continues to be shedding cash, with most ladies’s groups subsidised by their male colleagues.
But, on the flip facet, there’s not a lot revenue in males’s professional sport exterior North America at the second, and it has had a decades-long head begin on girls’s sport in most international locations.
In phrases of income, girls’s skilled sport is demonstrably rising very quick. According to Deloitte, its whole projected global earnings ought to have hit $2.35bn in 2025, greater than triple the determine for 2022.
Basketball and soccer account for 80 per cent of those revenues, however cricket’s Women’s Premier League in India has simply began its fourth season, having held a blockbuster participant public sale in November.
$672billion
We spent $672bn on lodging, meals and journey whereas going to look at or play sport final 12 months, in accordance with the report. This doesn’t embody any expenditure on tickets or entry charges, as these prices are accounted for in the skilled sport and participatory sport columns, respectively.
Having stalled throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, sport-related journey is booming once more and is forecast to offer 60 per cent of the whole trade’s income development between now and 2030. Sports-related tourism accounted for 10 per cent of the global journey trade’s whole spend in 2025. Having seen the value of resorts at this summer time’s males’s World Cup, I might anticipate information to be damaged.
$8.8trillion
This is what the report’s authors assume the global sports economy might be value in 2050 by way of whole income. That is double the UK’s present gross home product (the world’s sixth largest economy).
According to the report, the whole global revenues of sport final 12 months cleared $2.3trillion, which represents a compound annual development charge since 2016 of seven per cent. Not unhealthy, however the subsequent 25 years might be even higher, with the authors predicting annual development charges of 10 per cent.
The report breaks the global sports economy into 4 core industries — skilled sport, participatory sport, sporting items and sport tourism — with 5 a lot smaller “connected industries”.
However, hitting $8.8trillion by 2050 is much from a given. On the opposite. The report’s key message is that the headwinds talked about above might price the trade $1.6trillion in misplaced income by the center of this century. That is quite a lot of unsold tennis balls, tickets and trainers.