The purpose of this article is to analyze how the characteristics of different sports affect their respective labor market characteristics. To that end, we first classified Korean sports into the following four groups according to number of spectators and playing population (participation): Popular, Non-popular, Leisure, and Media. One sport was selected for each classification, and a survey was conducted of the people specializing in each sport. The resulting data were used to analyze employment characteristics such as firm size, wages and job security, career-building path, career goals, and job satisfaction in the labor market for each sport. We found significant differences between the sports with high and low spectatorship, whereas participation appeared to have almost no impact on labor market characteristics. Based on the results, we try to expand the meaning of Bourdieu’s social meaning of sports participation to apply it to spectator sports.
