Every country plays football. But which sport does each country play unusually much? I counted 99,246 sports clubs in Wikidata and coloured each country by the sport it over-indexes on most, and by how strongly.
Ask which sport a country loves and the answer is nearly always football. That is true and dull. Football is 51% of all the clubs in this data, so it tops the list almost everywhere. The better question is which sport a country has more of than you would expect: if a sport makes up 1% of the world's clubs but 10% of one country's, that country plays it ten times as much as the world average. Geographers call this a location quotient. Because it compares each country with itself, it cancels out the fact that some countries are far better recorded than others.
The result is a map of national quirks. Finland's signature sport is pesäpallo, its own version of baseball. Switzerland's is tchoukball, a no-contact game devised there around 1970. Ireland's is hurling and Poland's is speedway. Sweden's comes out as minigolf and the United Kingdom's as target shooting, though those two owe a lot to how Wikidata was filled in: count only clubs with a Wikipedia article and the UK's signature becomes cricket. Every map here can be checked that way.
Each country is coloured by the sport it over-indexes on most. The deeper the colour, the stronger the lead: a pale wash means a sport played a little more than the world average, a rich fill means a true heartland. Grey means there were too few clubs to say, or no sport stood out. Click a country to see its whole profile.
Tap or click any country to see which sports it plays more, and less, than the world.
Sports clubs and club teams in Wikidata (CC0), 2026-10-28. National teams, Olympic delegations, team seasons, school and college teams are left out. A sport can only be a signature with at least 10 clubs in the country, and countries need 100 clubs. Ranking uses the cautious ratio (see the method).
The biggest leads belong to sports that barely exist outside one country. Ranked by how many times the world average:
Countries with a signature sport, top 20 by location quotient. Bars are coloured by sport.
Choose a sport to see where it is over-represented. The places that over-index most glow on the map, with how many times the world average they play it. Switch on regions to see inside countries, where clubs have coordinates in Wikidata (44% of them do).
Times the world average = the sport's share of a place's clubs divided by its share of all clubs worldwide. Regions are Natural Earth first-level divisions (states, provinces, counties); a region needs 50 located clubs and 8 of the sport. Medal counts are all-time Olympic medal tables from English Wikipedia.
Some heartlands are famous (cricket in South Asia, hurling in Ireland, curling in Canada). Others were news to me. Click a card to see it on the map above.
Wikidata is too thin to go inside the UK for small sports, so here I switch to OpenStreetMap, where volunteers have mapped 147,269 pitches, courts, greens, clubs and sports centres with a sport tag. I merged features of the same sport that sit within about 200 metres of each other into one place to play (four pitches on one field count once), which leaves 114,148 places. Each county is coloured by the sport it has most over-represented compared with the UK as a whole.
OpenStreetMap features with a sport tag (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL), retrieved through the Overpass API, 2026-10-28. Counties: ceremonial counties of England, preserved counties of Wales, council areas of Scotland and districts of Northern Ireland, built from ONS boundaries (OGL v3). A county needs 300 places to play and a sport 5 places before it can be a heartland.
Clubs are only one way to measure a sport's grip. I checked them against two others. First, all-time Olympic medal tables for 50 sports from English Wikipedia (19,613 medals won by countries that exist today). Where a country has at least five medals in a sport, its medal over-representation and its club over-representation agree only loosely (Spearman's rank correlation 0.28 across 117 country and sport pairs): medals reward a few elite athletes, clubs measure everyday play. The pairs that are high on both are the real heartlands.
Each dot is a country and sport with at least five Olympic medals and at least 10 clubs. Both axes are times the world average, on a log scale.
Second, how much people read about each sport: Wikipedia page views in 2025 for 59 sports' main articles in 29 language editions. A language that reads about a sport far more than the average language is a rough signal of interest among its speakers (languages are not countries, so this is a loose guide).
Wikimedia pageviews API, user views, January to December 2025. Times the average = a sport's share of a language edition's views across these sports, divided by its average share across all 29 editions.
For each sport and country I divide the sport's share of the country's clubs by the sport's share of all clubs in the world. A value of 1 is exactly average; 6 means the sport makes up six times as large a share of that country's clubs as of the world's. Because both shares come from the same country's records, a country that is thoroughly recorded and one that is barely recorded can be compared fairly, as long as their gaps are not specific to one sport.
Small counts make wild ratios: one croquet club in a small country can look like a 50 times heartland. Three rules stop that. A country needs at least 100 clubs in total before it is mapped. A sport needs at least 10 clubs in a country before that country can be its heartland, and at least 30 clubs worldwide to be listed. And the signature sport is chosen by a cautious ratio: the location quotient recalculated with the club count replaced by the lower end of a 90% Poisson interval for it. With 10 clubs the cautious count is about 5.4; with 100 it is about 84.1. So a sport needs a big lead or plenty of clubs to win, and the page shows both the plain and the cautious figure.
Items in Wikidata that are a sports club or sports team (or any subclass) and have both a sport and a country: 144,811 items. I removed 44,202 that are national sides, Olympic and Paralympic delegations, "nation at" competition entries, cycling team seasons, youth and reserve sides, school, college and university teams, and commercial motor-racing and esports teams, leaving 99,246 clubs in 214 present-day countries (clubs recorded only under former states such as the Soviet Union are left out). A club listed under several sports counts as a fraction for each, so every club counts once. Sport variants are merged (women's football into football, camogie into hurling, all ski disciplines into skiing, and so on); umbrella values such as "winter sport" and mind sports such as chess are left out.
Wikidata records what volunteers and bulk imports have put into it. Some countries have imported whole registries of clubs for one sport, which inflates that sport there: the 851 UK shooting clubs, the 1,236 Norwegian athletics clubs and the 142 Swedish minigolf clubs look like imports of this kind. The "only clubs with a Wikipedia article" switch is a check: it keeps the 82,378 clubs that someone has written an encyclopedia article about. That removes most imports but brings in a different bias, towards clubs that editors find notable. 71 of the 87 countries mapped both ways keep the same signature sport. Multi-sport clubs are often recorded under football alone, which hides sports such as fencing that are usually sections of larger clubs. None of this measures how many people play: it measures organised clubs as recorded.
OpenStreetMap is mapped by volunteers, and some places are mapped in more detail than others; again, comparing each county with itself removes the overall difference but not a local enthusiasm for tagging, say, bowling greens. The 147,269 features were merged into 114,148 places to play (one per sport per grid square of about 220 by 200 metres). Sport England's Active Lives survey reports activity by local authority, but not for small sports at county level, so it is not used here.