Do you know which are the most practiced sports in Spain?
Football and basketball take the first and second places respectively, but the third place by licenses is going to surprise you.
There is good news in the world of those of us who know that sport is the best way to face life: more and more people think like us. But we should ask which sports people do, in order to see the healthiest trends around us.
Few surprises for the first and second places
There is no need to even look at the data to know that in our country there is a king sport that dominates above all others. It is, obviously, football. If we go by the number of federated licenses for football, we find more than 800,000 players and no fewer than 21,000 clubs.
To put it in perspective, one out of every four Spaniards who does sport plays football. It is no surprise, and it can even be seen in television coverage or in sports betting. Click here to check it.
The second most practiced sport, quite far behind football, is another one that could not be missing from the list. It is basketball. What is surprising about the sport of the basket is that it has grown a great deal in recent decades, something due in large part to the successes of players such as Pau Gasol and to the impact of the Spanish national team’s victories in major championships.
The surprising third place
If the number one and number two do not cause the slightest surprise, with number three things change quite a bit. By number of licenses, the third most practiced sport in the country is golf.
Yes, this one has become a passion for many people if we go by the official figures. It has more than 280,000 licenses and some 600 clubs perfectly registered and federated.
These figures seem modest compared with those we saw for football, but the truth is that nobody can compete with the tradition of the king sport. Another thing that stands out about golf is that it keeps growing even though it does not have a major television backing for its events, and the victories of its stars rarely take up more than half a page in the specialized newspapers.
Tennis and cycling, two sports that do not lose the trail of the others
Far from the leading trio we find some sports that do not have as much following, but that show remarkable stability in their number of followers. We always speak of federated participants, since that is the only valid figure for analyzing them.
Tennis and cycling each have around 80,000 steady practitioners, and these are two of the sports that have always been most popular in Spain.
In short, it seems difficult for anyone to take the throne from football in the long term. Nevertheless, it is clear that our country is taking an increasing interest in sports that until not long ago did not have a wide following.
