Membership in sport clubs
This indicator measures the proportion of people who are registered as members of at least one sports club belonging to one of the 16 state athletic federations.
Here sports club membership acts as an example for all club membership.
There is no data available on overall club membership, so sport and sports clubs provide a way of measuring this. Germany's gymnastics and sports clubs are the country's most active and popular organisations. They also encourage inclusion and integration.
The indicator is based on an annual survey by the German Olympic Confederation (DOSB). It provides reliable information about the number of sports clubs and club membership. To date, the analysis of membership structure has been restricted to age, gender and organisational level. Across Germany, reliable information on members of sports club with migration background is still not available.
However, the German Sport Development Report now includes information on the number of migrants who are members of sports clubs in Germany. This report has been commissioned every two years by the Federal Institute for Sports Science, the German Olympic Confederation and the state sports federations since 2004. The 2013/14 report shows the proportion of members with migration background to be 6.2 per cent. However, the validity of this data is disputed. For future reports, the federal government is therefore calling for the survey to be expanded in order to improve the database.