Greatest Sporting Nation takes a timeout
We began with a simple, captivating idea: which is the best sporting nation in the world? In our quest to find an answer, we embarked on an amazing journey to produce a unique, painstakingly curated database of world sporting results.
In the words of Greatest Sporting Nation (GSN) founder Dan Thompson: ‘After 18 great years, we’re taking a break while we concentrate on other projects. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss using our unique content - or carrying forward the Greatest Sporting Nation torch. In the meantime, thank you to everyone who ever visited the site, or suggested new sports for inclusion, or wrote in with queries (or complaints!) about our methodology. It’s been hard work but also a rare privilege to develop the only comprehensive global ranking of sporting prowess!’
GSN features 18 years of country-by-country data, from 2008 to 2025 included, covering all the events from approximately 2,000 major international tournaments, Summer and Winter Olympics included. Over the years, we’ve tracked 109 sports/disciplines (see here or below for more details on how we include tournaments and sports, and how we assign points), and we followed the sporting results of 213 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
We’ve created a huge dataset identifying the countries finishing in the top-eight places in each tournament (and each event for multi-event tournaments), easily searchable through a genuinely user-friendly website, a treasure trove for sporting enthusiasts and national sports federations alike.
On GSN, you can find out, for example, which country won the Basketball World Championships in 2019, which country won the Paris 2024 Olympics, and which country won the women’s 200 m backstroke at the Paris Games, which was the sportiest country in the world in 2022, how many GSN points Tajikistan earned in 2008, and which was Hong Kong’s highest point-scoring sport in 2021. We researched the factors that determine national sporting success, and drew the profiles of the world’s top sporting nations, aggregating results over discrete four-year periods, and even voiced our opinion on how to make football better.
Thank you to all our readers, and all the sporting nations of the world!
Greatest Sporting Nation is a ranking of countries based on their performance in top-level international tournaments in sports in which there is genuine global competition. Countries (national teams and/or individual athletes) score Qualifying Points by finishing in the top eight places in Qualifying Events.
These Qualifying Points are then weighted to produce GSN Points, based on a formula that takes into account individual vs team sports, the sport’s participation (number of countries) and the frequency (annual/biennial/quadrennial) of the tournaments.
The Country scoring the most Points in a calendar year wins the Global Cup for that year. The country that scores the most points relative to its population wins the Per Capita Cup. For a more detailed explanation, please refer to the ‘How It Works’ section on the site.
