FIVB statistics show how volleyball is organised across indoor, beach and development programmes. The figures below cover the 2025 World Championships, the Volleyball Nations League, Olympic qualification, rankings, beach volleyball and selected FIVB initiatives. Dates and locations are retained so that planned event figures are not confused with historical results.
Contents
- World Championships
- Volleyball Nations League
- Olympic qualification and rankings
- Beach volleyball
- Development and athlete support
- Participation and global reach
World Championships
The 2025 FIVB Volleyball World Championships mark a substantial change in scale. Each gender’s tournament features 32 national teams, up from 24 in the previous format. FIVB identifies 2025 as the first World Championship edition with 32 teams per gender and the first edition to be held biannually. Across the men’s and women’s competitions, 43 different countries are represented.
The representation figures supplied by FIVB span five continental confederations:
| Confederation | Countries represented in 2025 World Championships |
|---|---|
| Africa | 6 |
| Asia | 8 |
| Europe | 19 |
| NORCECA | 6 |
| South America | 4 |
The men’s World Championship is scheduled for Manila, Philippines, from September 12 to 28, 2025. It is the 21st edition and contains 64 matches. The Philippines is the first Southeast Asian host of the men’s World Championship. FIVB also describes the tournament as the first men’s edition since 1949 to be staged in an odd year.
Qualification for the 2025 men’s event combines host status, continental competition and ranking-based selection. The Philippines and Italy are the two automatic qualifiers. Fifteen places were awarded through the 2023 Continental Championships, while the remaining 15 places were filled through the FIVB World Rankings as of August 30, 2024.
The women’s 2025 World Championship is scheduled to take place in Thailand. The supplied FIVB figures identify the host countries and the overall representation, while the men’s competition has the more detailed match and qualification breakdown above.
Volleyball Nations League
The 2025 FIVB Volleyball Nations League is the seventh edition of the annual event. It expands to 18 national teams per gender for the first time. In the women’s competition, Czechia is a rookie participant, while Belgium returns after a two-year absence.
The 2025 women’s preliminary phase begins June 4, 2025. Week one includes Rio de Janeiro, Beijing and Ottawa. Week two includes Hong Kong, Istanbul and Belgrade. The women’s Final Round is scheduled for July 23–27, 2025.
The VNL format introduced in 2021 uses pools of eight teams per gender. During the three-week pool phase, each team plays 12 matches. The complete pool phase contains 96 matches, followed by an eight-team Finals field and eight Finals matches. The format uses 12 unique locations around the world.
These figures describe a competition built around repeated international matchups rather than a single host location. The 18-team expansion changes the scale of the field, while the 12-match schedule gives every participating team a defined pool-phase workload. The eight-team Finals field then reduces the competition to a shorter knockout-stage group.
Olympic qualification and rankings
The Road to Paris Volleyball Qualifiers allocated six Olympic quota places per gender. The format began with the top 24 teams that had not yet qualified, divided into three pools of eight. The top two teams from each pool qualified for Paris 2024, accounting for six places per gender through the qualifier tournaments.
The remaining five Olympic places per gender were filled using the FIVB World Ranking after the 2024 VNL preliminary phase. This created a qualification pathway combining direct tournament performance with ranking position.
FIVB implemented its World Ranking system on February 1, 2020. The system uses official match results dating back to January 1, 2019. The FIVB rankings page lists eight active categories: senior men, senior women, men’s U21, women’s U21, boys’ U19, girls’ U19, boys’ U17 and girls’ U17.
FIVB’s Strategic Vision gives separate senior-ranking totals of 86 National Federations in the men’s world ranking and 77 National Federations in the women’s world ranking. The organisation states an aim to double the number of countries represented in the FIVB World Ranking by 2028. These figures refer to the Strategic Vision’s stated totals and objective, rather than a new ranking calculation.
Beach volleyball
The 2025 Beach Volleyball World Championships are scheduled for Adelaide from November 14 to 23, 2025. FIVB lists 96 qualified teams, split evenly into 48 men’s pairs and 48 women’s pairs. The event is planned across two venues: The Drive and Pinky Flat/Tarntanya Wama.
The 2025 Beach Pro Tour delivered 56 different stops across the season. Women competed at 49 Beach Pro Tour events. The tour included 12 double-gender Elite events, seven Challenge stops and a record-high 37 Futures stops.
Futures events were hosted by 22 countries across four continental confederations. That distribution shows the developmental tier’s geographic reach, while the Elite and Challenge counts distinguish the tour’s event levels. The supplied FIVB figures describe the season structure and hosting footprint; they do not provide a complete medal table or athlete ranking.
| Beach volleyball measure | FIVB figure for 2025 |
|---|---|
| Beach World Championship qualified teams | 96 |
| Men’s pairs at the World Championship | 48 |
| Women’s pairs at the World Championship | 48 |
| Beach Pro Tour stops | 56 |
| Women’s Beach Pro Tour events | 49 |
| Double-gender Elite events | 12 |
| Challenge stops | 7 |
| Futures stops | 37 |
| Countries hosting Futures events | 22 |
Development and athlete support
Volleyball Empowerment approved 341 projects in 2025, covering 107 National Federations. The year’s allocation included 124 coaching projects, 109 equipment projects and 108 knowledge-transfer projects. The three categories account for the 341 approved projects.
Since 2017, FIVB says Volleyball Empowerment has invested more than USD 57 million, supported more than 1,740 projects and reached 207 National Federations. A separate FIVB Strategic Vision describes the programme as operating in more than 200 countries, with more than 1,100 projects and approximately USD 40 million invested. These legacy Strategic Vision figures are retained as stated by that document and should not be treated as independently verified or automatically reconciled with the later programme totals.
The 2025 results also include medal figures for supported teams. Empowerment-supported beach volleyball teams won 382 medals across FIVB, continental, zonal and multisport events. Supported indoor volleyball teams won 99 medals. The two figures refer to different disciplines and should not be combined into a single undifferentiated competition total.
The FIVB Development Commission delivered 90 development courses in 2025. The courses were delivered across 54 organisers and engaged 2,969 participants. For the LA28 cycle, IOC Olympic Solidarity investment into volleyball programmes reached USD 4,081,222, which FIVB says is 33 percent higher than in 2022.
Participation and global reach
FIVB reported 47,000 visitors at Volleyball Experiences during the 2025 senior world championships. At the Volleyball Foundation launch event, donations and a charity auction raised more than CHF 559,000.
Community initiatives supplied additional participation measures. The Brahmaputra Volleyball League in Assam introduced more than 10,000 children to volleyball. The KISS Volleyball Foundation Festival welcomed more than 40,000 attendees, including 5,000 youth participants. Its largest volleyball exhibition match attempt featured 430 players and exceeded the previous record by 136 participants.
FIVB’s governance review reported a 35-point increase since the previous ASOIF evaluation and a 95-point overall climb since the initial ASOIF review in 2016–2017. The review recorded gains of 11 points in Transparency, four in Integrity, nine in Democracy, six in Development and five in Control Mechanisms.
The FIVB Strategic Vision attributes 52 percent of volleyball’s total media revenue worldwide to the VNL. The same document says FIVB sold close to 1.2 million tickets at Paris 2024, reached more than 5.7 billion people and generated about USD 1 billion in media return on investment. Those Paris 2024 figures are organisation-reported reach, ticket and media-ROI measures, not attendance or audience estimates independently calculated here.