Volleyball Popularity Around the World

  • If you go to google trends you can find amazing information about any subject, about volleyball you can see figures about volleyball popularity around the world and during the time. you can see here that as a sport it was the most popular during 2014 W CH and then 2012 OG and that it is most searched in these countries: Iran, Peru, Puerto Rico, Poland, Philippines, Bulgaria.


    By the way I want to ask another question here, if you look at volleycountry.com or worldofvolley.com users in Alexa (here ), you can see that %75 of the users are from Azerbaijan, why there is such interest here from Azerbaijani users? Because I dont think we have lots of people from Azerbaijan in this forum. One answer is that the data is mainly for the website not forum, then I ask my general question that why Azerbaijani people are that interested in English volleyball websites, not any other country like what we see in google trends?


    I would be thankful to hear your answers and your general opinions about volleyball popularity.

  • Part of the reason for the popularity in Azerbaijan is due to the fact that the country has been paying large amounts of money to attract the best foreign players to play in their domestic league.


    Has that success translated into the national team, not really in my opinion.


    The reason why volleyball is so popular in Japan is that the Japanese women and men's teams were successful. Even as the teams performed worse (the 1990s) the game was still popular because the older stars moved into coaching or commentary. Plus they had strong domestic leagues and lower level support systems (through schools and universities).


    In the US, volleyball has always been more popular with women than with men. Part of this was due to the ruling of Title IX, which made educational funding of sports equal for boys and girls. American football has the most athletes under scholarship for men, so volleyball was not chosen with men at most schools, but volleyball for women was almost immediately accepted. As the number of schools playing volleyball at the college level increased (as well in high school), more parents and people have become involved in the sport. However, there is still not a professional league in the US. This is partially due to the size of the country, but also the economics. Major League Volleyball in the 1980s failed due to few immediate rivals, played in smaller gymnasiums (high school or smaller colleges) and little name recognition of players. In the 1980s we would very rarely see the national team on television, usually only the Olympics. At least now with the internet, you can see where the national team players are playing (foreign country and team), track them on twitter and maybe catch some highlights on youtube.


  • For me this is a big loss for US volleyball because after finishing school maybe there are talented players who did not have a chanse to play professional volleyball and many of them stop with volleyball because we know that there is no so many teams in the world in which all these guys and girls can play professionaly. Yes probably these who show more qualities in their shool teams became professional players but i suppose that there are many who are also talented but for one or another reason they cannot sign professional contract in Europe or someone in Asia. That's pity because maybe US will be even stronger than today. Not that they are not in the moment but they can be even better if they can choose players for NT from more professionaly prepared people.

  • In Argentina volleyball has a decent following but it's kind of 'niche' and of course only men's volleyball is popular (in women's matches you will rarely see more than 400 people...). Obviously football owns 90% of the "sports market" here, then there's rugby, tennis, motor sports, basketball and then volleyball I guess.


    Though the league has became stronger and more popular in last years, the popularity of the NT has somewhat decreased IMO. Partially because of the irrelevant results (though this year was good) and partially because there aren't iconic/charismatic players nowadays like there used to be years ago (Milinkovic, Conte sr., Weber). Last year we were on the brink of not having the WCh broadcasted on our tv, something which I don't remember ever happening since I follow this sport.

  • In my country, Women's volleyball is more popular than Men's. I think this is partly because the most famous sport is men's basketball, having a professional league here. Although, women's volleyball has semi pro league.


    Volleyball community in my country is growing these past years and I hope it translates to better volleyball program. Our players lack international exposure, proper guidance from world class trainers, and facilities.

  • Volleycountry has been our partner for some years now and I have had access to all recent stats sheets providing similar information. It is extremely useful when you need overall and broader understanding of your website's popularity. However, I doubt these data are superbly accurate. Googe Trends seems more plausible in terms of trends, clicks per country, and so on. We've used Alexa for several years and I think no one has ever paid too much attention where the clicks come from. It is nevertheless interesting and I don't know if Azerbaijan is really our most popular destination but I have absolutely no explanation why this region and country in particular (providing that this piece of information is true indeed and that there are not many users changing their IPs for some reason). Yes, there are not many Azerbaijani here in the forum, whereas the Polish, Iranian, Italian users, for instance, are way more. There is another sheet we discussed earlier this year, it was taken out from Jiri Popelka's Google page in Czech and it showed that the Czech domain is actually quite trendy. After all, Volleycountry is available also in Czech and with some decent popularity.


    What is much more important to Volleycountry is that domain traffic is mostly made through the forum. It seems that the forum continues its great work and pushes the website forward, not the other way around. And this is one very useful corollary we can make when reading the reports from all these tools. We are doing our best to invite Volleycountry's readers to the forum. In this way they can stay more with us, they will improve their written language skills and will increase their volleyball knowledge. And this will be our contribution to expanding the volleyball map.

  • A little tip about USA not having a pro league.


    USA Volleyball is now running Volleyball Premier League (VPL), which is a professional tournament. A pity it lasts just about a week. Most of their international players come back to play it. Teams belong to the USA Volleyball regional federations. There have been 3 editions for men's volleyball and four for women's.


    On the other side, different time there have been pro women's leagues in the USA, which failed and disappared:
    -Major League Volleyball (1987-89)
    -Women's Western Volleyball League (1992-93)
    -National Volleyball Association (1994-98)
    -Professional Volleyball League (1996-97)
    -United States Professional Volleyball (2002)


    -Women's National Volleyball League never made to start.


    and now from 2012 Volleyball Premier League held by the Federation, which is what makes me feel like it can last.


    Considering how much american players suffer overseas and how homesick they are, it would be amazing if they can develop it to a good one.

  • Thanks to all and special thanks to Yavor.


    I want to add sth that I forgot to write in the first post, in google trends you can compare different subjects, as you can see here , volleyball is less popular than Basketball and tennis, but more popular than handball and rugby.
    another interesting thing that you can see there is that mostly all the sports lost popularit during the time, with a very low rate, but football popularity has been increasing.

  • That's a very interesting topic. Is there any Japan user here? I ask it because when I went in Japan some years ago, I was very surprised by discovering how much volleyball is followed and played at schools, very much more than Italy. The question is obvious: why in the lasy 40 years Japan did not produce a good number of great players (both women and men)?

    Per un pir, un pam un persec per na brogna e na rumleina, nuetr'a sam d'la Ghirlandeina nuetr'a sam da rispeter




  • It is interesting to see this rise of rugby worlwide, ESPN Brazil is providing a massive coverage, broadcasting all the games with pre match and so on, even if very very little people do like it ( but i like :) ) , while volleyball the sport that gained everything for us is still ignored.


    I wish i can live yo see a change cause i'm a sport lover and i think sports should be given a fair treatment not just the fucking football, and the change must star with the fans of its sport supprting more games and not just their favored teams. It is so sad to see empty halls in important tournaments

  • I'm not sure if the statistics is right , but I know many people from Azerbaijan following this forum who don't write because of language, time or etc. Football is the most popular sport in Azerbaijan. Individual sport- combat sports are popular too. I think as team sport most successful team was women volleyball team. It is generally popular in Azerbaijan, if you go and ask who is Korotenko or Mammadova on the streets most of the people will probably know. But fans are less, I mean who would like to go to volleyball matches , cheer for them, who interested in world volleyball.

  • On our Inside-Volley.com page on facebook we have 12 500 members and more than half of the are from Philippines. In top 12 there is only 2 countries from Europe: Italy and Turkey. In ranking classificated is 45 countries (on last place Venezuela with 27 members) and you don't see there countries like Bulgaria, Russia or Czech Rep.

  • On our Inside-Volley.com page on facebook we have 12 500 members and more than half of the are from Philippines. In top 12 there is only 2 countries from Europe: Italy and Turkey. In ranking classificated is 45 countries (on last place Venezuela with 27 members) and you don't see there countries like Bulgaria, Russia or Czech Rep.


    It could be that they don't know about our site/facebook page because it is in English. I could be wrong of course.

  • On our Inside-Volley.com page on facebook we have 12 500 members and more than half of the are from Philippines. In top 12 there is only 2 countries from Europe: Italy and Turkey. In ranking classificated is 45 countries (on last place Venezuela with 27 members) and you don't see there countries like Bulgaria, Russia or Czech Rep.

    Volleycountry's Facebook page also grew significantly in the last few weeks. A video from the Korean league attracted some attention and then, quite surprisingly, there were a lot of followers from India 8| Suddenly Bangalore became Volleycountry's top traffic destination. And it's not like there is much going on with volleyball in India. I don't know what to think about this whole thing anymore. I don't even know how it becomes popular there.


    Regarding the forum's page, perhaps people still see it as a different source from Volleycountry, I would be interested in knowing what part of the fan base overlaps. As for Bulgaria, we surely can't offer as many fans as the Philippines or India :) But I think that the forum and Volleycountry in general are not that popular there either. And brahmin is right, not all volleyball fans in those places read news in English.

  • Inside-Volley from the beginning have more fans from outside Europe and Asia is always on 1st place so Im not supprised about Philippines or India (: and of course in members our site I don't see fans of inside-volley, but fans of volley general ;)


    Regarding the forum's page, perhaps people still see it as a different source from Volleycountry, I would be interested in knowing what part of the fan base overlaps.


    Before 'invasion' fans from India - not that much. Volleycountry is strong in European countries where men's volley is more popular. Inside-volley is more popular in Asian and South American (Peru, Chile) countries where women's volley is more popular. As I wrote before in top 12 we have only 2 countries from Europe: Italy, Turkey and from Turkey I think 90% fans of women's volley ;)
    And as I mentioned you don't see Bulgaria or Czech Rep. among 45 countries on i-v page, but on volleycountry both are very high in ranking.