Each month the Scattered Clouds blog takes a look at the wonderful world of tourism through a data and evidence-led lens, all in pursuit of transforming tourism sector data into insight of course!

A focus on football tourism - May 2026

So, after more than half a century the BBC has decided to blow the final whistle on Football Focus (I will try and keep the puns to a minimum!), which got me thinking that I’ve not devoted one of these monthly blog posts to the importance of football to tourism up until now.

The domestic season may be coming to its end but within a matter of weeks the FIFA World Cup will be kicking off across Canada, the USA and Mexico, reminding us that football can be a motivation for trips that are short in duration and local as well as those that are lengthy and international.

Across all matches played by the 92 teams in the English Football League in the 2024/25 season total attendance stood at a remarkable 42,649,709. Each of those attendances carries with it economic value, in a minority of cases it might just be the cost of the ticket, but for most there will have been money spent on getting to and from the match, food and drink, and in many instances paid overnight accommodation.

What does and doesn’t count as tourism gets a bit complicated when we are talking about day trips, if it is an activity that someone does within their own local area on a regular basis it doesn’t count, but if it entails a bit of travel and is not to a place that is visited routinely then it does, provided overall trip duration exceeds three hours – something that the advent of VAR helps with!

I reckon I’m on safe ground in saying that expenditure relating to watching football in person that constitutes tourism spend is in the billions of pounds each year, boosted even more in recent times thanks to the rapid growth in attendance at WSL and other women’s matches.

Results from a question included on the 2019 International Passenger Survey by VisitBritain found that 1.5 million inbound visits featured watching live football, with overall average trip spend among this contingent coming in at £909, roughly one-third higher than was the typical inbound visit spend that year.

For many who attended a football match during their trip to Britain this was one element of a holiday, but close to a quarter of those who did so had travelled here with attending a match their primary motivation.

Club football is exceptionally good at helping tourism address two perennial challenges, namely regional and seasonal spread, with thirteen of the twenty Premier League teams from outside London and no league football during much of the peak summer period.

A growing number of clubs now offer stadium tours to fans, fast becoming a local visitor attraction as well as a sporting arena, while in 2024 the National Football Museum welcomed 208,037 visits. As grounds are redeveloped there has become a recognition that there is scope for an on-site hotel and associated hospitality venues that can generate revenue not only when a match is taking place, and those clubs with a ground whose footprint is large enough are able to offer conferencing facilities as a further strand to diversification. In fact I had the pleasure of presenting at the Etihad Stadium a couple of years ago and later this year will be heading to Anfield.

Back in 2006 the World Cup in Germany is recognised as having bolstered the nation’s tourism image, with a discernible uptick in how people around the world perceived the country according to the Anholt Nations Brand Index, with this a function not of the quality (or otherwise) of the football, but courtesy of having showcased the friendliness of the Germany people.

It remains to be seen whether the USA, Canada and Mexico will receive such a fillip this year. Closer to home Euro 2028 sees matches across England, Scotland, Wales and Republic of Ireland with 24 teams competing for the trophy, while the UK is the sole bidder for the 2035 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

The wider hospitality industry doesn’t just benefit from spending by those who attend football matches, fans of clubs, whether national or local, love to congregate so as to celebrate, or commiserate, collectively, with the upcoming World Cup an opportunity for devoted and fair-weather fans to do just that, something that the hard-pressed hospitality industry will warmly welcome.