Best WordPress Sports Themes
Since you are reading this, chances are that you are already planning or at least thinking about launching a sports website or perhaps creating a sports-related website like for a sports or health club.
It is undeniable that sports are a main part of our lives. FIFA World Cup 2014 may have just concluded recently but the excitement is very much alive judging from the fact that the internet is still bustling with stories and scandals from this season.
Then there’s the most prestigious tennis tournament, the Wimbledon Championships and the premier men’s professional basketball league, the NBA. These are just some of the sports that a lot of us do not seem to get enough of.
Starting your Own Sports Website
So you love sports and are always looking for ways to share your thoughts and opinions on anything related to sports? And that you are passionate about the players, game scores, statistics and even the fantasy games?
Well, in that case, why not start a sports blog or website. It’s not difficult at all. In fact, it is so simple that anyone can build one. You just need the right tools and information. Who knows… you can even monetize the website if your website is popular.
Building it with WordPress
If you are researching for a content management system or application to build your sports website, we strongly recommend that you consider using WordPress. Why? Here are a few reasons:
- WordPress’s control panel is very easy to use. With all the tight deadlines and traffic surge related to a sports website, you will want something uncomplicated to help you create and publish articles quickly and effortlessly. Many well know websites are run on WordPress.
- It is crucial for a sports website to be accessible anywhere and on various devices. With WordPress websites, you can easily transform your site into a mobile ready sports site with just a few clicks.
- You can also connect your WordPress website to social media tools like Facebook and Twitter so that your readers can share your articles easily.
- WordPress is popular because of its large community. There are lots of sports related themes (premium and free-to-use) and widgets on the internet.
12 Best WordPress Sports Themes
I have always mentioned that in order to build a website, one of your most important tasks is to create a website design that’s not only appropriate but also enticing to your readers.
For a sports website, you would of course want your website to bring out the excitement of the sports, be it football (or soccer if you like), basketball, tennis, cycling etc. Fortunately, there are lots of WordPress sports themes on the internet and you would have no trouble finding one that is perfect for your sports and your style of reporting. You can look for a WordPress sports theme that provides lots of blog space if you like or perhaps one that offers large spaces for images. Perhaps you want a theme that’s more magazine-like.
To help you narrow down your search, here’s a list of some of my favorite WordPress sports themes, divided into 2 i.e. premium themes and free themes.
Premium WordPress Sports Themes
Here are 10 premium WordPress sports themes that are user-friendly and affordable.
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Real Soccer – Sport Clubs Responsive Theme
Real Soccer is another great 100% responsive theme perfect for blogging about the FIFA World Cup and it comes with an eye-catching design. If you are passionate about the World Cup or soccer in general, then this WP theme is for you! Who will be the champion for Word Cup 2018?!
This theme is responsive, and is designed for football, soccer, and sport clubs. It comes with great soccer features such as List of Player, League Table, Player profile, Fixtures & Results etc.
With a built-in theme customizer, you have plenty of opportunities to customize the theme, from post types and post formats to multiple color options to over 600 Google fonts. It also offers awesome sliders which can help create a more impressive site.
You will be glad to know that this theme comes with 6 months of support from GoodLayers. Other features include SEO ready, custom widgets, multilingual ready and over 80 shortcodes.
This theme has been downloaded and bought by 4,035 users as of this writing! This is a great testimonial to how good is this theme! It has even worn the Envato Most Wanted Contest – 1st Prize of Micro Niche Theme.
Below are a few more screenshots of the theme, showing various features which you may find interesting.
Main content
Players
Fixtures and Results
Gallery
Theme settings
This is a quick look at the theme’s setting page. Here you can change the look and feel and how your website will function, without the need to touch the coding. Very convenient indeed.
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Sportsline
This beautiful theme was specially designed with the 2014 FIFA World Cup in mind. Therefore, you will be able to find features that are helpful to you when you blog about football, for example the ability to easily display matches’ results.
Sportsline is built with Bootstrap 3 and you can expect a very powerful and intuitive framework when working on this theme.
It is also a responsive theme and this means that your readers can view your site on any devices. Despite the developers focusing on football when designing the theme, I find this theme is rather flexible and not strictly only suitable for football. You can easily configure the theme to suit other sports.
There’s also a gallery where you can post images effortlessly. The great thing about this gallery is that it can also be displayed in the sidebar through the gallery widget.
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Soccer Club
Soccer Club by Theme Forest is designed especially for sports that are team based e.g. football/soccer, baseball, rugby, basketball, tennis and even sports clubs.
You will find features in this theme that will help you create an impressive sports website. There are tools for you to easily manage fixtures like team, time and venue of matches as well as manage the match results. There are even player and team management tools where you can display and maintain individual player and team information quickly and easily.
What is really fantastic about this theme is that it is Woo Commerce ready. You have the choice to turn this sports website into an online store if you so wish. And you don’t have to be an expert to use this theme. With their advanced page builder, anyone can just drag-and-drop elements to create great sites!
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Gym, Fitness and Yoga WordPress Theme
This is a clean and functional WordPress sports theme that is very user-friendly and easy to setup. It is again fully responsive to enable viewing anywhere and anytime. With light colors, it is designed for the gym and fitness enthusiastic but is flexible enough to be used for other sports too.
As with most WordPress themes available on ThemeForest, this theme is highly customizable with features like being fully editable, ability to custom post types and post formats as well as theme customizer. Thus, you can build your gym (or other sports) site the way you want it, whether as a gallery-based blog or an audio video site.
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WordPress SportsPress Theme for Sport Clubs
Looking for a WordPress sports theme for your soccer club, tennis club or volleyball club? Well, look no further because SPORTIX – WordPress SportsPress Theme offers the features you need to create an uniquely yours site!
The theme has a simple and cheerful feel to it which is similar the layback feeling you get from watching or playing sports. This minimalist design also provides users an easier way to manage the club site. It comes with lots of user-friendly customization tools like filterable portfolio and theme customizer.
This theme features seamless integration with SportsPress, the only WordPress plugin for serious teams and athletes. SportsPress is an all-in-one sports club manager for WordPress. It includes standings, fixtures, results, teams, players, staff and many more!
This theme also comes with 24/7 free support and 100% satisfaction guarantee!
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Club Sports – Events and Sports News Theme
Club Sports is a perfect sports theme for clubs and has a very sports magazine look.
There are a good number of sports related widgets that you can add to build an informative sports club site e.g. club spotlights, next match, featured news, featured player, and points table.
It is fully responsive and offers options to enable or disable functions individually. It comes with an advanced theme options panel thus providing you a stress-free way to manage your site. It is very customizable and can also be used for other types of magazine style sites.
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Golf Club, Sports & Events WordPress Theme
No sports themes review is complete without a golf theme. Elegantly designed with neat content blocks set against a combination of white and dark background, this theme is ideal for a golf club site. Simple yet stylish, this theme is sure to delight golf club fans out there.
It is highly customizable with plenty of custom widgets giving you the flexibility to design your unique site without having to touch any coding. Users can easily get their site up and running in no time.
Your readers will find it a breeze to surf your site as the theme has many navigation tools that include additional menu at the footer and a back-to-top button.
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Tennis Today WordPress Theme
A tennis fan? You may want to check this WordPress theme out! This tennis WordPress theme is a minimalist theme that will make your site stand out in the crowd. This theme is a perfect option for tennis club (as well as other sport clubs), personal trainer, sports school, sports review magazine, tennis club, sport blog, sports store and any sport related website.
It doesn’t matter if you have no programming skills. Its’ flexibility of the theme allows you to change colors, typography and post formats in just minutes and without any coding involved. There are also over 80 shortcodes that let you compose your content easily.
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Splash – WordPress Sports Theme for Basketball, Football, Soccer and Baseball Clubs
This is an elegant theme for sports enthusiasts. It is suitable for basketball, football, soccer, baseball, and many other sports sites. It has all that you would need to get your site ready quickly and effortlessly.
It is a clean design and has multiple content categories and featured sections for you to create an informative site for your visitors. The responsive effect ensures that your website looks just as good whether viewed from a computer or a mobile device.
Customization is easily achieved. You have plenty of options from the type of slider you prefer to the typography to the sidebar positions.
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Billiard – Creative Sporting WordPress Theme
This is a stylish WordPress theme designed for billiard sites. It is highly customizable even if you do not have any coding knowledge. There are lots of customizations tools like multiple color options, custom widgets, sliders and typography to create an awesome site in a short time. The theme also comes with stock photos.
Managing the website is also easy with its user friendly control panel. If you ever have questions or problems with the theme, you can get in touch with their support staff anytime.
Billiard theme looks great on desktop, tablets and smartphones. This theme is responsive, and so it automatically resizes to fit on all screen sizes!
Free WordPress Sports Themes
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Sporty Theme
This responsive WordPress sports theme is a beautiful theme with a custom homepage images slider. Despite being free, it comes with quite a generous offer of features. You have a choice of 4 color layout options, template pages as well as the option to insert personalized logo, background, social media links and etc.
But best of all, it’s a free WordPress theme!
You do have the option to upgrade to the premium version by paying $9.95, where you will get additional layout options, more template page options as well as access to support and forums.
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HockeyTime
This theme was designed to look like a sports magazine and has adequate features and tools to help you manage one. Some features include shortcodes, drop-down menus, custom widgets, SEO optimization and antispam without Captcha.
Recently, the developers have added some interesting features to this theme e.g. custom sidebars, Google maps shortcode and it now even supports WooCommerce. Yes, you can build an e-commerce site using this free theme!However, the free version comes with sponsored links and that you are not allowed to use it to build sites for your clients. If you wish to remove the sponsored links or use the theme for building clients sites, you will need to upgrade to their premium version.
Free vs Premium Themes
I get this question often, “Should we really need to buy a premium WordPress theme?” Well, I won’t blame you for asking, especially with the number of beautifully designed free WordPress themes around. I would be tempted to download and use a free theme too!
However, let’s look at some facts about these 2 types of themes:
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Updates
Free themes are updated less often, if any at all. Premium themes are frequently updated. With new WordPress versions coming out every now and then, it pays to get a theme that is up-to-date with the latest WordPress version.
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Support
Free themes usually have little to no support or documentation. This can be a big headache if you have a serious problem that Googling for answers just don’t help. Premium themes have various support channels – you can usually email the developer for help, or get help from online forums.
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Customization
Free themes may not be as flexible and can be difficult to customize compared to premium themes.
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Uniqueness
Since you won’t need to pay for it, free themes are downloaded more often that premium themes especially popular ones. This may result in your site looking like many others out there.
Editor’s Opinion
One of the most important reasons for using premium themes is the support. You can be assured that you will get immediate attention when a problem arises. Time is of essence especially in sports. And you do want a more powerful theme with better options, easier customization and more impressive features.
Nevertheless, I am aware of the fact that not all of us are prepared to commit to a premium theme. In this case, our recommendation is for you to choose from trustable theme developers. Many offer a basic version of their premium themes for free, thus allowing you the opportunity to save money and at the same time, test out their work.
Now, wait no more, try out our theme recommendations above.