Commonly, badminton is played in singles or doubles while players hit the shuttlecock over the net. It’s played in the Summer Olympics and needs a lot of fitness to play. However, this article is all about the wonderful badminton statistics, facts and figures which may be surprising at times.
Badminton Statistics - The Quick Version
Here are a few of the key findings:
- Bristol searches for ‘badminton’ the most in the UK.
- There are 2.7 million posts for badminton on Instagram.
- Around 745,000 people participated in badminton in 2020.
How Popular Is Badminton In The UK?
In order to find out how popular badminton is across the UK, we decided to use the Keyword Finder tool to find out which of the most populous areas of the UK search for different terms.
We found the following:
Place | Average Monthly Searches Per 100,000 People For ‘badminton’ |
Bristol | 128.75 |
Bath | 116.06 |
Cambridge | 89.15 |
Slough | 77.27 |
Peterborough | 68.02 |
Stockport | 66.11 |
Manchester | 64.61 |
Reading | 64.01 |
Leicester | 63.10 |
Oxford | 62.50 |
UK (Average) | 42.31 |
To find this out, we researched how many average monthly searches there were in each area for the term ‘badminton’. We then divided this number by the population of that particular place and multiplied by 100,000.
A couple of things we can see from this are:
- Bristol clearly has the most searches per 100,000 followed fairly closely by Bath and then Cambridge.
- 5 of the top 10 places are in Southern regions.
We also did the same research with the same method for the term ‘badminton set’:
Place | Average Monthly Searches Per 100,000 People For ‘badminton set’ |
Peterborough | 30.92 |
Watford | 30.31 |
Stockport | 28.33 |
Crawley | 28.05 |
Rochdale | 27.80 |
Slough | 25.76 |
Birmingham | 24.87 |
Solihull | 24.35 |
Reading | 22.86 |
Coventry | 21.48 |
UK (Average) | 17.25 |
From this table, we can see that:
- Peterborough is only slightly the most popular in terms of searches, followed extremely closely by Watford and Stockport.
- 3 of the top 10 are in the West Midlands, while 3 other places are in Southern regions.
We did it a third time for the term ‘shuttlecock’ and here is what we found:
Place | Average Monthly Searches Per 100,000 People For ‘shuttlecock’ |
Stockport | 28.33 |
Slough | 25.76 |
Newcastle upon Tyne | 22.38 |
Manchester | 21.54 |
Bournemouth | 21.33 |
Bath | 21.10 |
Cambridge | 20.57 |
Bristol | 20.53 |
Salford | 19.25 |
Oxford | 18.75 |
UK (Average) | 14.85 |
A few key things from this table are:
- Stockport is the clear winner in terms of searches per month, followed by Slough and Newcastle upon Tyne.
- The figure for Stockport is nearly 2 times the UK average.
- 3 of the top 10 are in the North West, while 3 are in the South West.
Badminton On Social Media
Badminton is not only fairly popular around the world, it’s also got a lot of interest across social media. On TikTok alone, there has been over 860 million views on posts using the hashtag ‘#badminton’. This number is absolutely enormous for a sport that isn’t as popular as others. The most popular video on the hashtag has around 3 million likes, which again emphasises the popularity of badminton on the app.
Instagram can also be used as an example for how popular badminton is across social media. There have been over 2.7 million posts on the platform posted using the hashtag ‘#badminton’. This doesn’t sound like too big a number compared to TikTok and YouTube, but we promise you it’s huge.
If you search for badminton on YouTube, you get millions of results. If you filter it to most viewed videos, the top 5 videos add up to over 50 million views which is gigantic. This further reinforces the idea that the sport is quite popular on mainstream social media platforms.
Badminton Participation Statistics
Around 745,000 adults participated in the sport in 2020. This has decreased over the last few years as you can see on the chart below.
Although this figure has decreased, there is still a significant amount of people participating in the sport and it’s important to note that it may have decreased due to multiple lockdowns throughout 2020.
It’s clear that quite a large sum of people take part in the sport every year. Whether that’s playing singles or doubles, it’s great that so many people enjoy playing. We can also see that the sport is fairly popular among people on different social media platforms too which reinforces the popularity of badminton.
