The European Union (EU) created more than 1.37 million jobs in sports, 0.7 percent of its total employment, in 2021.

The number of people working in sports in the EU recovered after falling during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns (1.37 million in 2019; 1.31 million in 2020), according to the EU's statistical office Eurostat.

Employment in sports includes sports-related occupations (professional athletes, professional coaches in fitness centres), non-sports occupations (receptionists in fitness centres), and sports-related jobs outside the sports sector (school sports instructors).

In recent years, several European plans and programmes gave sports a significant profile.

The EU countries with the highest share of people working in sports were Sweden (1.4 percent of total employment), Finland (1.3 percent), Spain and France (1.1 percent).

Romania (0.2 percent of total employment), Malta (0.3 percent), Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Poland (0.4 percent) had the lowest shares of people working in sports.

Overall, men were more represented than women (55 percent and 45 percent, respectively), resulting in a slightly larger gender gap than that observed for overall employment (54 percent and 46 percent, respectively).

And young people (aged 15–29) made up 32 percent of those employed – nearly double the overall employment share (17 percent).

People aged 30-64 made up 65 percent of sports employment, which was 15 percentage points lower than the overall employment share.

Almost half (47 percent) of those employed in the sport sector had a medium level of education (International Standard Classification of Education levels 3-4), followed by those with tertiary education (ISCED 5-8) with 40 percent (3 percentage points higher than those in total employment), according to Eurostat.