Considering spots 1 and 2 also went to upcoming Olympics nations, I suspect that may have something to do with it. And the women’s soccer world cup.

Their methodology is honestly kinda dumb, and I’m surprised that it didn’t rely on something more meaningful like grassroots participation in organised sport, attendance numbers, or amount of recreational sport reported on sites like Strava.

The 2023 Ranking of Sports Cities ranks the top 100 cities that are most strongly associated with sport from around the world based on a combination of perception-based analysis and in-depth quantitative analysis.

More precisely, it focuses on the views of International Federation Presidents, Secretaries General, sports industry experts (such as Heads of Events) and more than 300 sports media representatives from around the world.

In addition, an in-depth analysis of the association between sport and a city in the digital space was conducted using the social media analytics tool Brandwatch. The analysis consists of the total number of mentions of the word “sport” associated with the name of the city on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as Reddit, blogs and websites. The search terms used in the analysis are in French, Spanish and German, in addition to English, for the spelling of the term “sport” and the cities’ names.

With the intention to illustrate the undeniable power and importance of being digitally present, the results of the digital analysis (0.50) were weighted higher compared to the opinions of International Sports Federations (0.25) and media representatives (0.25).