[Semaphor]

> There are more racquet sports players in the world than soccer players.

Are there? I (or at least I think that’s being played) only know it from US American TV shows, where business people or mobsters usually play it. But I’m in Germany, maybe it’s very regional, but massive in regions it’s big in? Does anyone have some information for me?

[iso1210]

If you're talking professional, there are at least 100,000 professional football players in the world

https://colors-newyork.com/how-many-professional-footballers...

There's fewer than 10,000 professional Tennis players, and that's far more popular professionally than squash and other racquet sports so at a professional level you're talking more than 10 times football than tennis.

https://tenniscreative.com/how-many-people-play-tennis/

For non-professional, Based on 2019 data, 87 million play tennis worldwide, and far fewer squash players (20-30 million)

https://squashezine.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-many-people-pla...

But them together and you're less than half of the 250 million football players

[victorbond]

Good start... but everyone leaves out BADMINTON, with over 200 million players. Badminton ALONE is almost as large as world football [!!!] As I said above... who knew? Thanks for commenting.

[Retric]

Team sports generally support larger numbers of professionals. In part because viewers are simply watching more people at the same time, but also because teams need redundancy.

[iso1210]

If you're stepping away from organised activities, practically every kid in the world plays football, all you need is a ball, clearly that outnumbers sports that need equipment - Tennis and especially Squash.

[Retric]

By that metric Tag is probably the most popular sport.

Anyway you need a ball, several people, a goal, and a large open field to play something vaguely close to soccer. So it’s popularity varies wildly by area.

[victorbond]

I was hoping that someone would challenge this, There are around 50 million more racket sports players than world football players [!!!] Who knew? And tennis is not the largest... badminton is, dominated by China and India. This is true even if you don't count table tennis, which is also a racquet sport. I was floored when I realized this. Football probably has more SPECTATOR/FANS... I don't know. but the player numbers? Not even close. Thanks for commenting.