World Athletics saw a strong year of competition on the track and boost in revenue in 2025 amid increased investment in the sport, but still took on a $10 million loss, according to its annual report released on Friday.
The global governing body released a detailed 90-page breakdown of its finances that provided a deeper look into how track and field’s leading organization’s budget has fared in the last year.
In the report, the organization posted $69.283 million in total revenue and took just over $10 million in losses on $79.4 million in expenses.
World Athletics said it poured into the development of the sport in 2025 along with committing resources to athletes and its own positioning to draw in revenue-generating events. Sebastian Coe, the organization’s president, noted early in the report that any increase in investment in the sport is necessary since track and field is simply not just limited to a handful of events during the outdoor season.
“We are no longer a summer sport spanning just a few months,” Coe said. “We are a sport that is on show 12 months of the year.
A deeper look at the report outlined how World Athletics has spent and pulled in profits in 2025 compared to recent years, with the $69.283 million revenue total including a roughly $10 million dividend from the International Olympic Committee that was paid out in 2024 and essentially split into four pieces across non-Summer Olympic years, according to Coe.
World Athletics said it will maintain a balanced budget during the four-year period, which sees another dividend before the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, the $79.4 million in operating expenses are the highest ever for the organization, which also revealed that it continues to invest in rising member federations to help develop and run their operations.
Since 2024, when expenses dipped to $70 million from $72.0m just a year earlier, World Athletics has boosted spending to support a busy schedule of events that includes its Continental Tour, Indoor Tour, Cross-Country Tour, Race Walking Tour and Combined Events Tour.
In the past three years, a push to rake in commercial opportunities has seen a surge in partners that have impacted a revenue increase and 2025 proved that the strategy has worked, with the bulk of income being steered from commercial rights sales at $53.8 million.
And Coe pointed out that a push by World Athletics to expand the program and number of nations that participated in last year’s world championships is a sign that more is more as newer partners join longtime sponsors in establishing a true stake in the financial state of the sport.
“The World Athletics Championships Tokyo 2025 showed us the scale of our reach with 84 countries making a final or a top-eight finish,” Coe said. “This is an extraordinary number, the highest ever, and sets us apart from all other sport. An unprecedented global footprint.”
The next and most immediate test of the organization comes with this week’s Ultimate Championship in Budapest as a newer revenue stream emerges in the years when no world championship or Olympics serves as an extra expected cash infusion.
With what is being touted as a “record-breaking” $10 million prize pot for track and field, athletes will battle in 28 disciplines that feature a handful of semifinals, final rounds that draw from the most recent world and Olympic champions and will look different than other meets, as viewers will see refreshed visuals and a modified format in a move to rejuvenate some of the traditional aspects of a typical event.
