In Brazil, Colombia, and Chile, football absorbs a very significant share of national sports investment. Players who never achieve stable professionalism—that is, the vast majority—complete their training without a diploma or alternative income. A qualitative study published in 2025 in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, titled “Small Pond, Big Opportunities: Rethinking Social Mobility through Niche Sports in Latin America” (Oliver Chen, Upper Canada College, Toronto, Canada), compares the social mobility trajectories offered by football and badminton in Latin America. It is based on 47 media sources and 3 semi-structured interviews, without robust quantitative data on schooling or income stability.
The Essentials
- Football concentrates a very dominant share of sports investment in Latin America, according to the 2025 Frontiers study, but only an infinitesimal fraction of players achieves stable professionalism.
- The Chen study (2025) concludes qualitatively that badminton offers better access to scholarships and schooling than football in Latin America, without producing any quantified ratio; athletics is not studied.
- The mechanism is structural: minor sports impose on athletes a dual trajectory, training and studies, in the absence of early professional contracts that would justify school dropout.
- The Chilean Promising Athletes Program evaluates the physical capacities of Chilean schoolchildren to identify sports talent; it does not compare life trajectories between sports and has not identified any gap in graduation rates between footballers and practitioners of niche sports.
- The open question: if global financing continues to concentrate on a few media-dominant sports, the equitable mobility pathways represented by minor sports could narrow.
One Sport Absorbs Nearly All the Money, and the Overwhelming Majority of Players See None of It
The figures are clear. In Latin America, football absorbs a very significant share of national sports budgets, spanning federations, training centers, infrastructure, and television rights. England, Portugal, and Spain experience comparable concentration. In Latin America, the effect is amplified by the weakness of social safety nets: a young person who leaves school at 14 to join a training center and who does not achieve professionalism by age 20 has very few alternatives.
The problem stems from the demographics of talent. Brazilian training centers recruit tens of thousands of young people each year. The number of stable professional contracts—that is, regular salary for more than two years in a second-division club or above—is in the thousands for the entire continent. The ratio between the number of young players trained and those who become established professionals is sufficiently low to make a football career statistically risky for anyone abandoning academic training to pursue it.
The study published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living in 2025 measures this risk directly and compares it to other sports. The study is based on 47 media sources and 3 semi-structured interviews, including testimonies from badminton athletes such as Kevin Cordón (Guatemala) and Ygor Coelho (Brazil). It does not rely on comparative institutional databases from Brazil, Colombia, or Chile, and produces no quantified ratio of graduation or income stability.
The Dual Trajectory That Lack of Money Imposes on Minor Sport Athletes
The hypothesis that badminton promotes graduation more than football rests on the economic structure that underfunding creates: lacking early professional contracts, athletes maintain parallel academic training. This hypothesis is consistent with available data, notably the low graduation rate of Brazilian footballers who complete higher education, but it is not proven quantitatively in the Chen study (2025), which itself characterizes its conclusions as illustrative.
A Chilean or Colombian badminton player knows, from his or her earliest years of competition, that he or she will not live off the sport. Professional contracts in this discipline are extremely rare in Latin America. Federal aid, when it exists, covers competition travel, sometimes equipment, but not a salary. This economic constraint imposes a dual trajectory: train seriously and complete academic training, because there is no credible alternative.
Elite football produces the opposite effect. The existence of accessible professional contracts, even if statistically improbable, creates a school exit option that appears rational in the short term for a talented adolescent and his or her family. A training center recruiter offering a place at age 15, with boarding, equipment, and the promise of a career, represents a concrete alternative to years of abstract study. The problem emerges between ages 18 and 22, when the overwhelming majority of these young people are released without a diploma and without the professional connections that university might have provided. Brazilian data cited in the study indicates that an infinitesimal fraction of trained players achieves professionalism, both in Brazil and across Latin America.
The study compares exclusively football and badminton; athletics is not studied.
Lessons from the Chilean System
The Chilean Promising Athletes Program (CPAP) is a real Chilean public program, which is the subject of a separate study published in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology (Guevara-Araya et al., 2024, DOI 10.3390/jfmk10010006). The Chen 2025 study in Frontiers does not rely on this program.
The Chen study concludes qualitatively, drawing from its 47 media sources and 3 interviews, that badminton offers greater access to scholarships and schooling than football in Latin America, without quantifying the gap. Badminton emerges from this analysis as a sport whose economic constraints encourage athletes to maintain parallel academic training.
There is an exportable model here. Several Southeast Asian countries, where badminton is structurally integrated into the education system, have documented similar effects, notably Malaysia and Indonesia, where badminton school programs serve both as athletic talent pools and as school retention mechanisms in rural areas. The movement documenting how sports R&D is shifting to Asia, detailed here, is explained in part by this stronger integration between sports practice and academic training.
The Capture of Public Funding by Football: A Political Choice, Not an Inevitability
The funding imbalance between football and other sports results from repeated political decisions: subsidies for stadiums, tax arrangements with federations, television rights negotiated with public broadcasters, school programs that concentrate sports time on a single sport. These decisions have a logic: football is popular, full stadiums generate votes, and television rights feed federal coffers that in turn finance national sports policies.
When a very dominant share of sports investment goes toward a discipline in which only an infinitesimal fraction of practitioners achieves stable professionalism, the political choice deserves evaluation in light of its effects on social mobility, not only on FIFA rankings.
Alternatives exist and work. In Colombia, several municipalities have begun subsidizing racquet sports programs in secondary schools in disadvantaged areas, linking access to training to academic progress. The 2025 Frontiers study contains no comparative data on secondary school completion rates in Colombia between racquet sports practitioners and footballers. In Colombia as in Chile, minor sports federations are arguing for a partial reallocation of public sports budgets, 10 to 15% drawn from football allocations to finance multi-sport programs in schools. These proposals remain minority positions in national budget arbitration, but they are gaining ground in sports policy debates.
This debate also touches on how we think about human capital development more broadly. The question of autonomy in training trajectories arises with equal urgency in sports: giving young people the capacity to build multiple competencies simultaneously produces better long-term results than early and total specialization.
The Risks of a Global Sports Market That Concentrates Even Further
The global sports economy is moving in the opposite direction from what mobility data suggests. Television rights for major football leagues are exploding; the Super League may have failed to impose itself in its initial form, but the logic of concentrating revenues toward a few clubs and championships continues to accelerate. The Olympic Games themselves, after long resisting complete professionalization, now welcome sports designed for young audiences and digital platforms—breakdancing, skateboarding, surfing—whose economic model remains underdeveloped in Latin America.
The question raised by the Frontiers study, without explicitly formulating it, is this: if global sports financing continues to concentrate on the most media-dominant sports, the pathways of equitable mobility represented by minor sports—badminton, athletics, volleyball, swimming—could narrow due to lack of resources. The acceleration of sports globalization could progressively close alternative paths, imposing on minor sports federations a choice between aligning their programs with dominant elitist models or surviving on residual budgets.
This scenario remains conditional. But it justifies attention that sports policy systems, in Latin America and elsewhere, have not yet granted it. The Chilean Promising Athletes Program is an initial instrumental response on evaluating the physical capacities of young athletes; measuring life trajectories rather than mere performance would change the incentives of institutions managing budgets. Countries that want to use sport as a lever for social mobility rather than as spectacle—and these two objectives are not incompatible but require distinct choices—have in this approach a concrete tool.
Latin American decision-makers must determine whether they are prepared to defend these political choices against football federations that mobilize lobbying resources incomparable to those of badminton.
Sources
- Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, Chilean Sports Talent Detection System and sport pathways in Latin America (2025), https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sports-and-active-living/articles/10.3389/fspor.2025.1684657/full
- Sports R&D Is Shifting to Asia, Journal d’un Progressiste, https://journaldunprogressiste.fr/la-rd-sportive-bascule-en-asie/
- Autonomy in How We Work Matters as Much as Working Hours, Journal d’un Progressiste, https://journaldunprogressiste.fr/lautonomie-sur-la-maniere-de-travailler-compte-autant-que-la-duree-du-travail/
