Allow us to paraphrase an old saying: “Politics divides people, while sport brings them together.” Nowhere is this sentiment more appropriate than when designing your own sports WordPress website. A successful design will unite your team’s fans as one, and offer them all of the information they need to cheer on their heroes at the next match. Though, this dream is all for nought if you don’t know what to look for in a suitable theme.
It’s simple – you’re looking for functionality and features that enable fans to make contact with you, gather information about your team, and purchase official merchandise effortlessly. This means you’ll want a number of social engagement options, sections for league tables, fixtures, and player information, and a quality e-commerce solution you can rely on. A page builder plugin to design your site and extensive customization options are nice, but not strictly necessary.
We understand that narrowing down the available choices is tough – that’s why we’ve curated this list of the very best sports themes available. With a little digging, your ideal theme could be among them!
1. Big Slam
When you’re building a sports website, you’ll want to get visitors pumped about your club or team by injecting your design with as much excitement and branding as possible. The best way to accomplish this is to go with a sports theme that offers lots of customization options – such as Big Slam.
Although Big Slam is primarily focused on basketball, it also works well for just about any sport you’re involved in. This theme makes it a breeze to create custom event pages to keep visitors updated on all your team’s latest games, as well as player lists to feature your key talent. You can even create dedicated pages for individual players, games, and teams – a process made simple through the wide variety of demo content at your disposal.
Big Slam also makes use of a few key plugins to expand its functionality. For example, it’s fully compatible with SportsPress, which offers features such as game results, automated standings, and player rankings. In addition, it incorporates the GoodLayers page builder to provide you with an easy drag-and-drop editor. Finally, there are a wide variety of customization options to take advantage of during the design process, such as various headers, navigation styles, sidebars, and skin colors.
If you want near-total control over your design, along with a suite of handy features specifically designed for sports websites, Big Slam is a theme worth trying out.
2. Splash
Forget the visuals Splash conjures up – that of swimming pools and high dives – and think about the swish of a basketball hitting nothing but net. The question is: Does this theme score all three points, or is it just a big, fat air ball?
Upon loading the homepage, you’re greeted by an eye-catching display courtesy of the bundled Slider Revolution plugin. The navigation menu almost floats on top, and it’s an impactful first impression. The rest of your page layouts can be built using the bundled WPBakery Page Builder plugin, with a multitude of further customizations found within the WordPress Customizer.
Splash also provides integration with the popular SportsPress plugin. This provides league tables, fixture lists, and player and team profiles to give fans all of the information they’ll need to root on your team.
While we’ll stay away from cliches about this theme making a splash, it’s certainly powerful and flexible enough to create a solid team website.
3. Oxigeno
Sports themes often fall into two categories. There are fan sites dedicated to a particular club or league, and team ‘showcase’ sites offering visitors extensive information such as fixture schedules, results, and highlights. Oxigeno falls squarely into the latter category.
Most sports themes focus on ‘national’ sports, such as baseball, basketball, football, and soccer. However, it’s nice to see Oxigeno cover other popular sports too, such as swimming. Of course, you’re free to create a site for whichever sport you’re intending to focus on, using the bundled Bold Builder plugin. There are also plenty of ways to customize your layout further, such as a collection of Google Fonts, and a built-in menu and header builder.
That said, Oxigeno feels less polished than many similar themes. If you take a look at elements such as the footer in the theme’s demo, for example, you can argue that this isn’t the best looking of sports-focused options.
Overall, Oxigeno is a solid ‘journeyman’ theme. It covers the basics, although it doesn’t perform spectacularly on any front. Even so, it’s worth investigating further as it may offer the combined features and functionality you need. Just be aware that you’ll likely need to take some extra time to refine its default look.
4. TrekOn
Is your niche adventure and extreme sports? TrekOn offers ready-made demos for running, climbing, mountain biking, and more.
Each demo comes with essential pages such as Pricing Plans, Events, Our Services, and Contact Us. You’ll also get a lot of portfolio layout options, including sliders and masonry styles. The theme offers open-ended customization, and you can change the colors, typography, and other aspects of your website. Plus, it’s compatible with Elementor, which gives you more control over your site’s design.
TrekOn is WooCommerce-ready, which makes it an ideal theme if you want to sell sports products through your website. It also provides you with a wealth of widgets, including testimonials, team lists, pricing tables, events lists, calls to action, and many others. You can use these widgets anywhere on your site with simple shortcodes.
Overall, TrekOn is a feature-rich WordPress theme designed for promoting sports events and activities.
5. Khelo
The world of soccer is fast-paced and action-packed. Keeping up with literally hundreds of upcoming matches, player profiles, game results, and more is important. As such, you need a theme built with soccer at its core — enter Khelo.
Out of the box, Khelo ships with four home page layouts and a broad range of internal sections. For most of its pages, Khelo focuses on providing you with designs that enable you to share large amounts of soccer-related data. This includes game result pages, team breakdowns, player profiles, and more. The designs are modern and clean, which makes them a good fit for up-and-coming soccer clubs that need to look professional.
Given that soccer is a global sport, Khelo adapts by being ready for translation to practically any language you choose. The theme also ships with a breaking news scroll widget, match highlights video templates, point tables, and many more elements you can use to create the ultimate soccer website.
If you need a theme that adapts to the unique needs of a soccer club, Khelo offers the style and functionality you need.
6. Briny
Let’s face it, some sports are just plain cooler than others, and anything that has you spending time by the ocean wins by a nautical mile. If you run a business that caters to surfers or divers, you need a theme that shows you’re as cool as a morning wave — Briny comes washing in to help.
This theme was built with scuba diving, surfing, and boating businesses in mind — and it shows in its designs. Briny bundles multiple ready-to-go layouts, all using modern grid designs that are perfect to showcase pictures of your fun escapades to the beach. As you might imagine, all of Briny’s designs feature blue colors heavily, which is fitting.
On top of being stylish, Briny is also highly functional. The theme enables you to implement an online booking system, so customers can choose the best dates for classes or other services. It also integrates out of the box with the free WooCommerce plugin, in case you have a desire to sell products and services.
In all, Briny makes competing with other seaside businesses online an easier task. It’s a theme that understands the clientele you’re catering to, so it represents a stellar addition to your shortlist.
7. Sports Club
Sports Club is a theme that will appeal to those wanting to focus on a particular league or sport.
With chunky fonts and two slider plugins included (Layer Slider and Revolution Slider), Sports Club looks perhaps a little too similar to the other themes in this collection. Indeed, with the included Visual Content Composer plugin, you can quite easily create an all-too-familiar website.
However, by running the gamut of color options and choosing one of the hundreds of Google Fonts included, you can create a site that looks relatively unique. Furthermore, Sports Club is one of the only themes to offer parallax scrolling background images – something to consider if you’re looking to set your site apart.
Sports Club excels at pushing current information about your league into the spotlight. If your visitors need such information at a glance, Sports Club could be the right choice.
8. Real Soccer
Real Soccer is a beautiful sports magazine theme customized especially to suit soccer-based websites.
Real Soccer’s design makes heavy use of big, bold images: perfect for showcasing team and player shots on your website. It also stays consistent in terms of color. Minimal and complemented with great typography, Real Soccer’s design is a real treat to the eyes.
On the functionality front, Real Soccer is fully stocked. It has the capability to create detailed player profiles, league standings tables, and fixtures & results. Match reports, Google fonts and WooCommerce integration make the theme even better. The Master Slider plugin is included in the purchase package, free of charge.
9. FC United
Nothing can beat the rush of seeing your favorite sports team win a match. However, creating the perfect website to showcase your team could be pretty close. FC United may be able to help you.
This theme includes layouts for almost every type of sports website. You have designs for sports pubs, football clubs and schools, news sites, and more. Most sports websites are heavy on statistics and numbers, and all of these layouts enable you to display match reports, league tables, and other number-crunching information.
If you want to dig deeper into stats, FC United enables you to set up individual player profiles to bring a personal touch to your site. Combine that with the bundled Elementor page builder plugin, and you get a highly versatile theme both from a design standpoint and a visual one.
Sports websites require a lot more functionality than you may realize. If you’re looking for a theme that can both help you handle large amounts of data and is highly customizable, FC United can help put your club on the map!
10. Alchemists
You may not have realized, but sport is driven by numbers. You have league scores, player stats, upcoming matches, and much more. Finding a theme that can help you display this data without looking like a finance spreadsheet is tough. Alchemists looks to meet the challenge head-on.
Alchemists enables you to choose from dozens of pre-built designs for different types of sports sites. You have options for basketball, soccer, football, and even e-sports. Every design is bold and colorful, and you get access to a broad range of custom elements, such as tables, embedded streams, and game results. All are highly engaging, and fitting regardless of the sport you cover.
The theme also bundles in the WPBakery page builder plugin for easy drag-and-drop customization of your site. There are over 50 custom elements to choose from, most revolving around stats and individual players. Using Alchemists, you can also set up an online store to sell merchandise, thanks to the theme’s integration with the free WooCommerce plugin.
If you’re on the market for a theme that will enable you to share your passion and in-depth knowledge of sports, Alchemist is a rare breed that manages to make data fun. Regardless of your chosen sport, it’s worth checking out.
11. Redy
Dynamic, bold, and vibrant — your website should reflect your personality. Redy fits this mold. It’s a no-nonsense, modern, and flexible sports theme that’s perfect for athletes, fitness coaches, or any organizations promoting a healthy lifestyle.
This theme is easy to set up with just one click, and no coding experience is required, which lets you focus on your core offerings. Redy is also compatible with the powerful Elementor page builder. The drag-and-drop functionality of this plugin lets you create a truly unique layout that can be fully customized with over 750 different options.
Redy is highly responsive and optimized for mobile devices. The bundled Revolution Slider plugin enables you to create stunning swipe effects for your images. It’s compatible with lots of other useful plugins to assist with your busy sports events schedule, too, allowing you to incorporate functionality such as customizable Google Maps, MailChimp integration, appointment bookings, and more.
If you’re leading an active lifestyle and want a 100 percent responsive website that’s accessible on the go, Redy could be the optimal solution for you. Its contemporary design and action-centered layout make it a perfect theme for any sports maniac.
12. Endurer
Running is a very popular hobby, so it’s no surprise that there are a lot of clubs dedicated to it. If your running club’s website needs a theme to attract new members and update current ones, Endurer could be ideal.
It’s likely that your site’s goal is to get people motivated and moving. Fortunately, this theme does a good job of that with its default layout, and through its various options. The font choices are bold, and larger headings carry ‘battle scar’ style decorations that should get your visitors’ blood pumping. There are also a number of pre-built pages to help you showcase your club further.
In other words, there’s plenty in the box to get you started quickly. However, Endurer isn’t a one-trick pony. It’s a highly-customizable theme, with layouts for portfolios, galleries, and so on. You can also connect this theme to social media and display your accounts on your site, provide search functionality, and much more besides.
All in all, Endurer is likely to suit running clubs of all stripes. It’s perfect for pre-existing clubs with lots of members, although ‘startup’ groups will find plenty here to suit them as well.
13. Surfy
Surfing fanatics can’t imagine their lives without the ocean. In your own case, you might have wanted to share your passion with others. Surfy understands this, which is why your love for the waves is at the forefront of everything this theme offers.
With one click, you can import demo content and build your website immediately. The advanced built-in drag-and-drop page builder saves you the hassle of having to dig into code, and you get a wide choice of gorgeous home page layouts, headers, and menu styles. The customizable blog section leaves plenty of room to share your content with simplicity and style, and there are advanced typography options to fully customize your page.
Surfy’s ultra-responsive design is touch-friendly and will look great on any screen or device, which is especially handy for the beach. The theme also comes bundled with a premium Appointment Booking plugin, which lets you create a simple yet effective calendar for your work schedule.
In a nutshell, Surfy is a beautiful, highly visual theme for anyone looking to showcase their watersports activities. Its ease of use and the down-to-earth stylishness make it an excellent choice for any ocean freak.
14. Whistle Sport
Sports clubs are under-represented among WordPress themes. This can create some problems if you’re looking to build a website for this niche specifically. However, there are a few solid options out there, including Whistle Sport.
There are only two home page layouts available with this theme, but they’re both functional – which is to say they’ll work well for the majority of websites. Both include a full-screen header section, with clear navigation and space for contact information. Further down you’ll find team profiles, eCommerce panels, subscription functionality for tiered plans, and much more.
The bundled WPBakery Page Builder plugin will help you create and organize your layout to meet your exact requirements with ease. Whistle Sport also includes a plethora of Google Fonts and other customization options. All of this means there’s little stopping you from creating a unique and stylish website.
Overall, Whistle Sport may be just the ticket for your sports club’s site. It’s functional, flexible when needed, and looks great out of the box.