SportAccord Stats: Chess Popularity on the Rise

Chess Blog for Daily Chess News and Trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2013

Hello everyone,

Here is an interesting report via Fide on the increasing popularity of chess. It is based on the statistics with SportAccord which is the international body that includes all sport federations. 

SportAccord has 93 member organizations including chess. According to research carried out by visiting the official websites of all those international sport organizations, FIDE is in 14th place by the number of member federations. Most international sport federations cover 5 continents: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania. FIDE, as do a few other federations, puts Oceania under the Asian continent.

The world rank of international sport federations

Thirteen Federations have more members than FIDE. Those Federations are: Volleyball (220), Table Tennis (218), Athletics and Basketball (212), Football and Tennis (209), Taekwondo (205), Aquatics (Swimming-203), Judo (200), Boxing (196), Wight Lifting (189), Karate (188) and Body Building (182). Of those with more than FIDE, only Body Building and Karate are non-Olympic sports. It means that chess has surpassed 21 of the 33 Olympic sports (26 summer and 7 winter sports are accepted as Olympic).FIDE aims to pass 200 members in the next 4 years and to achieve the top ten rank among all sports federations. If you are wondering about the countries which are not yet members of FIDE, here they are.

In Asia: Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Kiribati, North Korea, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Niue Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Tonga, Oman, Tuvalu, Samoa, American Samoa and Vanuatu. That's 15 more countries that are not members of FIDE yet. The Asian Continent currently has 50 members and very soon will be the number one continent, with the largest number of members in the FIDE Family.

In Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Congo-Brazzavile, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Niger and South Sudan, a total of 12 countries are not at the moment members of FIDE. FIDE has been working intensively in Asia and Africa to access all countries. In Africa, FIDE has 41 member federations now.

In the Americas, 35 national chess federations are members of FIDE. 13 countries or territories are members of other International sport organizations, but not yet members of FIDE. Those are, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Cayman Islands, Dominica, French Guiana, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Since FIDE statutes require a territory to be recognized by the United Nations, French overseas regions (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique and, in the Indian Ocean, Mayotte and Réunion) are not able to join FIDE.

The same applies to those few European federations, affiliated to some international sports organizations, that cannot be accepted as FIDE members. Otherwise, Europe has a full complement of 54 national federations.

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