Sports Event Tracker: June 8 update
Two Circles analysts track the number of sports events taking place globally against an originally-scheduled, pre-Covid-19 sporting calendar. Only paid ticketed events for professional, competitive sports events with a projected attendance of at least 5,000 (pre-Covid-19) are considered.
Update: June 8
Time period: January 1-June 7, 2020
Originally scheduled number of events: 22,369
Actual number of events taken place: 10,237 (45.8%)
2020 Global Sports Calendar (Cumulative Weekly Events)
Football return boosts Portugal’s Covid-19 recovery
Major professional sport returned in Portugal last week for the first time in nearly three months with a full round of Primeira Liga football fixtures (nine games in total).
This meant there were four-and-a-half times the number of scheduled events (450%) over the course of the week in Portugal compared to the pre-Covid-19 calendar. Another full round of Primeira Liga fixtures take place this week.
In battling the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, Portugal has been one of Europe’s success stories – in particular given around a quarter of its population is 65 or older, and the country has the lowest number of intensive care beds on the continent. When a state of emergency was declared in Portugal on March 18 – closing schools, borders and closely monitoring patients in home isolation – the country had only 642 confirmed cases and two deaths.
Over the Iberian border, meanwhile, the top two tiers of Spanish football return on Thursday (June 11) – after which there will be 32 days of consecutive football in the country. This week there will be 21 games, four times the number of scheduled events (400%) in the country compared to the pre-Covid-19 calendar.
Elsewhere in Europe, Germany’s top-tier basketball league, Basketball Bundesliga, returned on Saturday (June 6) in an adjusted ‘tournament’ format, helping take the proportion of sports events in the country past 500%, the highest in the world.
This week, the semi-finals of the DFB-Pokal – the country’s knockout football cup competition – take place, bringing the proportion of events to a projected 617%.