LAUSANNE, 4 February 2019 – Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW) Sports today unveiled the results of its ‘2019 Ranking of Sports Cities.’ Three Olympic hosts cities land in the top three of the ranking – London, Los Angeles and Paris, respectively, with Tokyo and Olympic Capital Lausanne rounding out the top five.   

The ‘2019 Ranking of Sports City’ ranks the top 50 sports cities from around the world. Now in its seventh edition, the ranking has been improved with a new, more quantitative methodology. For the first time, the ranking focuses primarily on the viewpoints of International Federations (IFs) and sports media, combined with an in-depth analysis of the strength of the association between sport and a city in the digital environment. The latter consists of the total number of mentions of the word “sport” associated with the name of the city on social media platforms but also blogs and websites. In previous editions of the Ranking, the results were based on an online survey which was sent to a select group of experts and the general public. 

Lars Haue-Pedersen, Managing Director, BCW Sports, said: “It is interesting to see that the Olympic rings remain the most powerful brand with which cities can be associated, despite the various challenges facing the international sporting world. However, we can see from the results of our analysis of the digital environment that cities that are home to an internationally renowned football club, such as Manchester United or Real Madrid, are strongly associated with sport. Indeed, both Manchester and Madrid now featured in the top 10 of our ranking. I look forward to seeing how this trend will evolve in coming years.”  

With each edition of the poll, the three lowest ranked cities drop off the list and the top three non-listed cities named by the survey respondents are added. New cities to be added to the 2020 edition of the Ranking are Minsk (BLR), Salt Lake City (USA) and Gold Coast (AUS).  

A full result of the ‘2019 Ranking of Sports Cities’ can be downloaded here.  

Contacts:   Heloise Signe – Senior Consultant, BCW (Burson Cohn & Wolfe) Sports  Tel: +41 21 313 23 00 Email: heloise.signe@bcw-sport.com  

About Burson Cohn & Wolfe BCW (Burson Cohn & Wolfe) is one of the world’s largest full-service global communications agencies. Founded by the 2018 merger of Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolfe, BCW delivers digitally and datadriven creative content and integrated communications programs grounded in earned media and scaled across all channels for clients in the B2B, consumer, corporate, crisis management, CSR, healthcare, public affairs and technology sectors. BCW is a part of WPP (NYSE: WPP), a creative transformation company. To learn more, please visit www.bcw-global.com.