Public funding for sports and leisure in the states and the Federal District from 2013 to 2023

The study aims to analyze the public financing of sports and leisure in the states and the Federal District (FD), based on their respective public budgets in the period from 2013 to 2023. The descriptive research was carried out based on documentary analysis, with data collected in the Sistema de Informações Contábeis e Fiscais do Setor Público Brasileiro, using the critical methodology of analysis of sports financing based on indicators of expenditure magnitude and direction of expenditure. From 2013 to 2023, R$ 26.86 billion was spent by the states/DF, with a concentration of expenditure in 2013 and 2014, a process that was directly impacted by the states/DF that hosted the 2014 Men's World Cup; on the other hand, the years 2020 and 2021 were the ones with the lowest expenditure on sports and leisure in the period, as a reflection of the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the resources spent, there was the following distribution by geographic regions: Northeast (32.75%), Southeast (24.59%), Central-West (22.89%), North (13.47%) and South (6.30%). Still regarding the magnitude of the expenditure, the states/DF spent 0.25% of their total public budgets on the Sports and Leisure Function and had a per capita expenditure of R$ 16.37, with these values being different in the different regions. Regarding the expenditure direction indicator, there was the following distribution: Community Sports (33.03%), Other Sports and Leisure Subfunctions (29.26%), Performance Sports (22.56%), General Administration (8.45%) and Leisure (6.71%). Overall, spending on the Community Sports subfunction was prioritized, as it is more directly responsible for enabling sports to be accessed as a right. This was not the case for the Leisure subfunction, which received the least resources.