Tourismological classification of sporting events

Sporting events are programs, which are dominated by creative and complex facilities, primarily sports, but also recreation and entertainment. As such, they achieve tourism effects and goals and have a socio-economic importance for the city, region or state. Depending on the size and importance of sports event, sport has a different role in the context of promoting tourist destination, as well as different values. Each sport discipline has its own criteria by which athletes are ranked individually or as team. The subject of the research is to determine the criteria for the categorization of sporting events, in order to determine the importance of sporting events as an element of the tourist offer (individually or as part of a tourist destination). Also, this paper’s results present a comparative analysis of similar methodologies for the categorization of sporting events. Based on the research presented in the paper, there are four groups of criteria: economic, media, social and environmental. Together with this, paper gives the classification of traditional sporting events in the case of Serbia, dividing them in four groups.