App Store Keywords for Sports Apps: Sport-Specific Terms Travel Badly

Estimated volume / estimated difficulty on a 0-100 scale. The phrases are English in every storefront.

There are two kinds of rows. Global sports ("basketball", "cycling", "live scores") keep a volume above 38 in nearly every storefront. Regional or seasonal activities ("fantasy football", "golf gps", "ski tracker") fall to 3 to 16 in one or more storefronts. That is useful for deciding what to localise first, and it is a warning against averaging: the mean of "ski tracker" (25.0 volume) describes no real storefront. The mean difficulty of 10.8 hides a US value of 19 and a Brazilian value of 0.

Sports sits at the median for volume and exact-title share, while US median ratings (about 38,400) are more than 200 times Brazil's (187). The genre match is on the low side: 58.3% of US results were Sports apps, 18.3% were Games and 13.3% were Health & Fitness. Fantasy and trivia-style phrases pull in Games, and activity tracking pulls in Health & Fitness. The study's phrase-to-category mapping is approximate; read these shares as the competitive set for the phrase, not as a ruling on where an app belongs.

1. Choose the first market from the sport. If your app serves a regional sport, a low English score in another storefront is expected, not a failure. Localizing a listing without translating the app shows how to work one storefront at a time.
2. Expect a season. Sports interest peaks with leagues and tournaments. A single-day number cannot capture that, so read seasonal App Store keywords before you commit bytes to a time-bound term.
3. Do not chase the scoreboard head term. "Live scores" has a difficulty of 72 in the US and 58 in Great Britain. A smaller app is more likely to be found for one team, league or activity described precisely, though only a test in your market can show it.
4. Check the news side. Result and match-report apps may be compared with News apps, whose own numbers show how heavily the US dominates.

Six generic English phrases per category were queried through the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, with the top 10 results per query analysed: 36 queries and 360 slots for Sports, fetched 2026-11-01. The method is in the research methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV.

LocalASO is a Mac app that estimates volume and difficulty in 52 storefronts, each in its local language. It is a $29 one-time purchase; the free download needs a license key to run. See pricing.