Which Countries have the top-tier athletes in sport

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

Canada: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…
USA: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…

The Professional Athlete Index released.

Data study compares the probabilities of females and males from different countries being top tier athletes in three globally popular sports, as well as revealing which countries have the highest percentage of top level athletes in each sport.

China produces 11.72% of top tier female footballers, the highest percentage in the index. Japan (11.19%) and the USA (8.70%) rank second and third. Brazil produces the highest percentage of top tier male footballers globally (5.14%), followed by Argentina (4.38%) and Nigeria (3.44%).

11.15% of top level female tennis players are from the USA. Russia (7.93%) and France (5.84%) produce the next highest shares.

Most male players are from the USA (9.59%), then Italy (7.13%) and France (6.53%).

South Korea has the biggest share of elite female golfers at 23.19%, followed by Japan (20.11%) and the USA (12.27%). The USA produces the most elite male golfers (23.09%), ahead of the UK (10.17%) and Japan (7.96%).

Women in Iceland have the lowest odds of being a top tier footballer (1:1142), ahead of Norway (1:1521) and Sweden (1:3343). Men in Iceland have the lowest odds of being a top tier footballer (1:82), ahead of Montenegro (1:258) and Uruguay (1:451).

Berlin, Germany, December 2021 – Global Odds Index has commissioned a study by Magmatic Research that reveals and compares the odds of women and men being professional athletes in globally popular sports.

As a team fascinated by interesting data that can tell stories, Global Odds Index wanted to understand the likelihood of females and males in different countries being professional footballers, tennis players and golfers. The Professional

Athlete Index seeks to reveal the odds of reaching this elite by focusing only on athletes participating at the highest level of their sport. The index shows two things: which countries produce the highest percentage of top tier female and male professionals in each sport; and the countries in which females and males have the lowest odds of being a top tier athlete in each sport. The study produced two datasets in order to capture both larger countries, which generally provide a greater share of all athletes, and smaller countries, where people often have lower odds of being professionals.

How the study was conducted:

The study began by identifying the top female and male domestic league or competition in football, tennis and golf.

For football, the top domestic league was identified in a range of the most highly ranked nations according to the sport’s international ranking system. Data on athletes participating in these leagues was gathered for the latest completed year of the competition.

Next, data was found for tennis and golf. For these sports, the top tier competition is generally international, for example the ATP and WTA Tours in tennis. Player data was therefore collected from the appropriate international association for these sports.

For each sport in the study, the researchers recorded the total number of male and female athletes performing in the competitions around the world and their nationalities. They then combined this data to create a total list of athletes participating in the top tier of each sport, which allowed them to calculate the share of top level athletes that each country has in the different featured sports.

Following this, the researchers drilled into the data on a country-level basis by using it to calculate the odds of males and females from each nation currently being a top level athlete in each sport. The odds were calculated as the ratio of athletes vs. the total number of people born in each country between 1991-2003 (inclusive) against the ratio of non-athletes born in the same period.

The result is an index showing the percentage of top level male and female athletes that are from each country, and the odds of someone from each country being a top tier athlete in the featured sports.