2023 sport employment statistics in Europe now available

EOSE collates and publishes the latest sport employment statistics every year to underline main findings and tendencies and to help create policy discussions, concrete impact and potential collaborations through the sector.

We are pleased to present you with the latest European and national reports and fact sheets covering the period 2011-2023. Within the documents readers can find:

Detailed analysis of the European paid employment statistics in the 2023 Sport Employment Statistics in Europe: Research Report, including long-term trends and data on the total numbers, share and characteristics of people employed in the sport sector (gender, age, employed/self-employed status, full/part-time contracts, level of education) compared to all economic sectors combined
Short and easy to understand fact sheets including visual infographics on the main data points and characteristics both for Europe (EU27 countries + UK) and for each of the 28 countries in individual national fact sheets
Within each document an analysis of the whole sector, as well as a separate focus on workers with a sport and fitness occupation (e.g. coaches, instructors, athletes etc.), and people working in sport organisations

Changes and additions for 2024:

New, simplified and easy to understand design of the European Fact Sheet
New data available – a cross-tabulation of the employed/self-employed status and full/part-time contracts by workers’ ages and genders

Download the documents through the link below and read on for a summary of findings.

Download the 2023 Sport Employment Statistics

KEY 2023 SPORT EMPLOYMENT FINDINGS AND TRENDS AT THE EUROPEAN LEVEL

How many people work in the sector?

Sport employment in the EU+UK – the sum of workers with a sport and fitness occupation and all people working in sport organisations, both employed and self-employed – now represents 1 958 467 workers and this grew by +32.3% from 2011 to 2023.

5 countries with the largest sport employment represented 69.2% of this total:

The UK represented 21.4%
France – 14.7%
Spain – 12.5%
Germany – 12.2%
Italy – 8.3%

How has the sector dealt with the COVID pandemic?

Looking at the effects of the COVID pandemic on total sport employment, following a drop of -3.7% in total employment, the sector recovered by +13.4% by 2023. However, there are disparities between countries. The sector seems to have recovered to pre-COVID numbers in 18 countries, but is still below the 2019 levels in 10 others. By 2023, two of the countries with the highest number of people employed in sport had still not returned to 2019 numbers – UK (-2%) and Germany (-8.8%).

What is the share of sport within total employment?

The sport sector is taking up a growing share of total employment in all economic sectors – 0.84%. Since 2011 there was a growth of about +0.14 percentage points over 12 years, suggesting that sport employment had become increasingly significant in overall economy during this period.

The share of sport employment in total national labour force (all sectors) ranges widely across countries – in 2023, the highest share could be seen in Sweden (1.4%), Denmark (1.31%), UK (1.27%), the lowest – in Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia (between 0.28-0.39%).

Characteristics of sport employment

Through our analysis we aim to highlight realities, characteristics and tendencies by gender, age, level of education, type of working contract (full-time or part-time) and professional status (employed or self-employed) of people working in the sector.

Gender

Considering gender, the workforce skews more male than female (55% versus 45%). The proportion of female workers in the sport sector in 2023 (45%) was lower than in 2022 (45.7%) and 2011 when we started collating data (47.9%). It was also lower compared to the share of female in total employment across all sectors (46.7%). The proportion varies across European countries – the proportion of female workers per country is shown in the map below:

Age

Age-wise, there has been a steep rise in the proportion of young workers under 25 in the sector (25.9% in 2023, 3 percentage points above 2011), as well as a corresponding recent rise of workers with low qualifications level (+0.9 percentage points since 2020). In sport, we can see a lower proportion of workers aged 50 and over (24.2%) compared to the overall EU+UK employment (32.8%). People employed in sport had become better qualified over the previous 12 years, with the proportion of workers with high level qualifications growing from 28% in 2011 to 39% in 2023.

The map below shows the high variance of the proportion of young staff in the workforce – of particular note are Nordic countries with the proportion reaching over 40%.

Type of contract

Regarding the types of contracts, in 2023, more people employed in sport were on full-time contracts (56.8%) compared to part-time contracts (43.2%). This a significantly higher percentage of part-timers compared to the EU average for all sectors (18.9%). For female workers, the share is even higher – 50% of them had a part-time contract. The proportion of part-timers also vary widely across nations as shown on the map:

Professional status

In terms of professional status, compared to the broader EU+UK employment, sport employees are also significantly more likely to be self-employed (22.2% in sport versus 13.1% in all sectors). The share of self-employed in sport rose by 4.3 percentage points since 2011. Slightly more than half of all self-employed workers in sport were over the age of 40 years (54.9%).