Beach volleyball on the decline?

Using google trends & FB prophet to analyze & forecast search trends

I’ve often heard that beach volleyball is one of the fastest growing sports around the world.

Volleyball World even mentions volleyball is the 4th largest sport in the world with over 800 million fans worldwide.

So, I wanted to see if the sport I love to play is as popular as it’s made out to be!

I used google trends data as well as a browser extension to get the raw volumes of google searches across a bunch of keywords like “tennis”, “beach volleyball”, “pickleball”, “avp”, etc.

Beach Volleyball

For example, the term “beach volleyball” has a declining trend since 2004, the year google began collecting this data. In the latest month, only about 80k global searches were for "beach volleyball”

However, we can expect a major spike during the 2024 Olympic games. Every 4 years, beach volleyball gets an almost 10-25x boost in search popularity. I used Prophet, a Facebook open source library to forecast what the future search trends might yield. This library uses an additive model that can account for weekly and yearly seasonality effects, including non-linear effects.

My own forecasts show that the search popularity could spike to around 1m monthly searches, so it will be interesting to see if the 2024 olympics can beat these expectations.

Volleyball

The term “volleyball” has had a similarly negative trend since 2004, with a further drop due to covid. Since then, it’s had a resurgence and will likely continue to increase for the 2024 Olympics, potentially topping out at >5m monthly searches worldwide.

Other Sports

I wanted to compare beach volleyball against other sports and professional federations. More niche sports like tennis, pickleball, padel, and footvolley seemed like a decent comparison.

Both pickleball, footvolley, & padel (not shown) have gained popularity worldwide since the start of covid. 

Pickleball has had huge growth in the last few years, generating almost 1m monthly searches globally, almost 10x more than beach volleyball in a typical month. Footvolley generates about half of the search volume compared to beach volleyball, but still a decent number considering the recent growth of such a niche sport.

Compared to other sports federations like the ATP (tennis), the AVP is on a major decline. However, searches ~2004 were more likely related to the alien vs predator movie franchises. The line around 2010 is the year the AVP filed for bankruptcy. Since then, it’s continued to decrease even further.

I also checked to see if there was any trend between the # of matches (and tournaments) played vs search popularity, especially after the AVP bankruptcy. However, there doesn’t seem to be a major correlation between the two. FIVB is hosting more matches every season (except during covid) and not necessarily driving more searches (although “fivb” searches could also refer to indoor volleyball). 

So is there any hope?

It’s likely the terms “beach volleyball” do not adequately encompass the full popularity of the sport. 

College related searches such as “ncaa volleyball” do show an increasing popularity, with the peak in 2023 being ~25% higher (in absolute terms) than prior years. Hopefully this younger generation will help to drive the popularity of the sport into the future!

Appendix - Popularity by Country

I found it fascinating to visualize the Google Trend results by country.

Out of “beach volleyball”, “padel” and “pickleball”, beach volleyball was the most popular in Australia and no other countries.

Padel is popular in south / central America and western europe. Pickleball was the most popular searched sport in the US and Canada compared to the other two.

(Low volume countries are excluded)