Signature Sports: Where the World's Niche Games Are Unusually Popular. Location Quotients of Sports Clubs in Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, by Country, Region and UK County

Football dominates almost every country's sporting life, so asking which sport a country plays most says little. I ask instead which sport each country plays unusually much. From Wikidata I take 99,246 sports clubs and club teams in 214 present-day countries, after removing national sides, delegations, team seasons and school and college teams, and compute for every sport and country a location quotient: the sport's share of the country's clubs divided by its share of the world's. Because each country is compared with itself, differences in how thoroughly countries are recorded cancel out. To stop small counts producing false heartlands, a country needs 100 clubs, a sport 10 clubs in the country, and the signature sport is chosen by a cautious ratio that uses the lower end of a 90% Poisson interval. 92 of 92 countries have a signature sport, spread over 34 sports: pesäpallo in Finland (70x the world average), tchoukball in Switzerland, hurling in Ireland, speedway in Poland, korfball in the Netherlands. A check using only the 82,378 clubs with a Wikipedia article keeps the same signature in 71 of 87 countries and exposes bulk imports, such as target shooting clubs in the United Kingdom. Olympic medal tables agree only loosely with the club data (Spearman's rho = 0.28). Inside the United Kingdom I repeat the method with 114,148 places to play mapped in OpenStreetMap, by county. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/niche-sports/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/niche-sports. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/niche-sports/. Text, figures and derived data: CC BY 4.0, except tables derived from OpenStreetMap (ODbL 1.0: uk_county_sport.csv, uk_signature.csv, uk_sites_niche.csv) and from Wikipedia medal tables (CC BY-SA 4.0: olympic_medals.csv). Code: MIT. Wikidata and Wikimedia pageview data are CC0. Boundaries: Natural Earth (public domain) and Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3).