How many registered footballers are there worldwide?

How to get close to this number

Take the participation figure and apply a registration rate. This site's companion question puts regular players at around two hundred and fifty million, and registration with a club or federation is a much higher commitment than kicking a ball. Roughly one in ten being formally registered gives the answer.

The gap between playing and being registered is the useful distinction. Most football is informal — a park, a pitch, a group of friends — and formal registration requires a club, a fee and a competition to enter. Any sports participation statistic depends heavily on whether it counts informal play, and the two figures differ by an order of magnitude.

The professional ratio narrows further: around one in a hundred and seventy registered players earns a living at it. Stacking the three figures — playing, registered, professional — gives a pyramid where each step up is roughly a tenth or less of the one below, which is the shape of essentially every competitive activity.