The contribution of the sports economy to Italy’s gross domestic product (GDP) is around €24.5 billion, namely 1.37 percent of the country’s total GDP, and a workforce of 420,000 people, according to a recent report by Istituto per il Credito Sportivo (ICS). The study titled Il PIL dello sport. La dimensione economica dello Sport in Italia (Tr.: The GDP of sport. The economic dimension of sport in Italy) was officially presented at the Foro Italico sports complex in Rome on July 21 by the ICS president, Andrea Abodi, and the chairman and CEO of Sport e Salute (formerly CONI Servizi), Vito Cozzoli. The ICS is an Italian public bank whose activities focus on sports venues and Italy’s sustainable development through sport and culture. The presentation event also saw the participation of Giorgio Alleva, full professor of statistics at the Sapienza University of Rome and former president of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), who drafted the report.
The figures indicated above comprise three components: sports facilities, the industries that produce goods that are necessary to perform sports (e.g. sporting goods), and the relevant parts of industries for which sport is an important input in their production processes (e.g. TV and other media, tourism, etc.). Based on the above figures, sport contributes to Italy’s GDP to the same extent as the entire food industry and twice as much as the automobile industry, as stressed by the author of the report. Data are referred to 2019, the most recent year for which the official statistics relevant to provide a comprehensive report on the sports economy were available. The year 2019 is described as a good benchmark anyway since it was immediately ahead of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this sense, it will constitute a good temporal reference for future updates to the report. The ICS intends indeed to follow up on this first edition, as also explained in the report. The contribution of the sports economy at large to Italy’s GDP in 2019 was up by 1.9 percent when compared to 2018, and the increase was 11.4 percent when compared to 2012.
As for the specific sports manufacturing segment, Italy had 419,000 companies in this segment in 2019, down from 593,000 in 2018. Italy ranks third amongst the five largest European sports manufacturers. France tops the ranking with 656,000 companies, followed by Germany with 536,000, then Italy with 419,000 and Spain with 266,000. Data for the U.K. sports manufacturing industry were not available for 2019, but the report suggests that the number of sports manufacturers in the U.K. was higher than Italy’s anyway.
The report concludes by stressing that the impact of sport extends, in fact, well beyond GDP and the figures in the report itself. Sport has a major impact on the well-being of a population, leading to additional direct and indirect effects on the economy that would deserve further investigation and new interpretative models, says the author of the report.
The full 62-page report Il PIL dello sport. La dimensione economica dello sport in Italia is available for download on the ICS website.
