While football (or soccer) is the most played sport, it receives the least government funding in Australia. While it may or may not be the factor it is quite expensive to play here.

4 comments

  1. I don’t know what you mean with government funding. Professional sport clubs often are not allowed to get government funding. Although they get sometimes creative. I think the most money is spend on the (riot) police to make sure hooligans don’t clash. So in that sense football costs the most money.

    In amateur sports I think funds are evenly distributed. Because football is the largest sport football clubs gets the most money. However, the last decade or so the funds provided are reduced. Most amateur sports clubs rely on membership fees, sponsorship often from local small businesses and volunteers.

  2. That’s a really hard question to answer. Most facilities are owned wholly or partly by municipalities, but these will range from big stadiums, skating rinks, etc. All the way down to basic football fields in local parks, tracks in small schools. Local sports clubs often use these and some will make enough in membership fees to cover all costs, but others will need more extensive support, add to that that local as well as national companies plus the national lottery (danskespil) supports it all to varying degrees as well as loads of volunteer work. There are just so many expenses and so many revenue streams. But I suppose football and handball, simply by virtue of being the biggest sports, gets the most.

  3. Football here gets the most. I found a 2020 report. Football association got around 45.357.454,47€. Next was Paralympic committee with 23.542.490,17€. Then Basketbal association – 12.296.788,01€, Handball association – 12.226.064,69€, Ski Association of Slovenia – 11.055.783,20€, Alpine Association of Slovenia – 9.627.375,01€ and so on. Bobsleigh association got 145,02€. They have 2 clubs. Who knew.

    edit: sorry, this is how much money associations had that year, not how much they got.

  4. The answer for Italy wildly depends on what kind of funding we are talking about. If by government, we mean any funding for any level (grassroots to Olympic/national team), both directly (i.e., investing money in the national team) or indirectly (building facilities to accommodate the sport), it is probably football (as in soccer), mostly because the national football federation (FIGC) is humongous in comparison to the others, and most places have at least one facility suitable to play a form of football. This makes sense, as it’s the most commonly played sport in Italy.

    Other ways of considering govt funding (e.g., most funding per athlete at the Olympic level) are more difficult to assess. Some sports probably receive more money for each athlete at high levels (e.g., swimming), as they are less reliant on private sponsors, but how much money they get is difficult to determine as the CONI (head govt sports association) funds both the sports federation and sometimes the team they train with (which, for sports where it’s hard/impossible to earn a wage as non-professionals, usually involves police/military service and affiliation). The annual budgets for all the federations [are technically all online](https://www.coni.it/it/coni/amministrazione-trasparente/altri-contenuti/dati-ulteriori/bilanci-federali.html), but there are no aggregated statistics and I can’t find the funding for military/police teams so I suspect nobody fucking knows (please correct me if it’s somewhere obvious!).

    tl;dr football/soccer

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