Around a week ago I promised, in a tweet, to compare the public expenditures on sports and arts in Iceland. The motivation was a comment by an Icelandic handball player who, in an interview, compared the State’s spending on sports with than on culture, in which case you get an almost tenfold difference. 
This, however, does not give a very accurate picture of the taxpayer’s money ratio between the two categories, since in the case of Iceland, sports are mostly funded by the local governments. So let us estimate the spending on those two.
Sports
Looking at the fiscal year 2010, and examining in details the numbers in the state budget and some local government we get the following estimations for total net sports expenditures. (Net, meaning that if running a swimming pool costs 10M ISK and tickets account for 2M ISK then the net expenditure is 8M ISK). [TABLE=2]
Comments and Sources:
a) State: All
This is taken from the 2010 Budget of Iceland. The number 338M is listed under “Ýmis íþróttamál” (Various sports) and can for example be seen in this visualisation by Datamarket. Note: Sports are frequently grouped in one category with “Hobby and Youth Expenditures” in fiscal statistics, this thus including things like summer camps and funding for boy-scout groups. In fact, the Icelandic Youth Movement (UMFÍ) is devoted to sports in some proportion but that number (around 104M) is excluded from this statistics.
b) Local: Pools & Stadiums
This (as well as the next few fields) is taken from the database of the federation of local goverments in Iceland (http://www.samband.is). This is the net cost of running the Swimming Pools, Stadium and Other Sports Facilities by the local governments.
c) Local: Sports Areas
Same source as above. Mainly skiing areas etc.
d) Local: Various Grants
The above mentioned database includes a field for “Grants og Youth and Sports Issues”. There local Governments spent 6,341,227 ISK on that in 2010. This thus includes non-sport related youth expenditures as well (summer jobs, grants issued to past time centres etc.). We looked at the detailed budgets of FOUR Icelandic local governments in 2010: Seltjarnarnes, Kópavogur, Mosfellsbær and Fljótsdalshérað (those had the most accessible budgets online). Judging from those, close to 90% of all such grants go to sports-related causes. Assuming that this is true for other local governments as well we arrived at the number 5,707 million ISK.
e) Local: Joint Costs
The joint cost of the entire Sports and Youth budget of the local governments was 812,699 ISK . Since the cost of the Sports account for around 80% of expenditures in this category, the it was estimated that the joint costs for this category (like office costs etc) are 645 million ISK.
Culture
Estimating the Expenditures for Culture depends of course upon definition. Taking the rather broad definition and including all public donations to arts, museums, libraries, and “heritage related stuff” but excluding tv and radio, we get the following: [TABLE=3]
Comments and Sources:
f) State budget
As said before, these are net expenditures taken from the state budget of Iceland in 2010. You can find them by clicking this link, and then browsing through
2010-> “Sundurliðanir”-> Fjármál ríkisaðila í A-hluta”-> ->”02 Menntamálaráðuneyti” & “3.umr”.
My summary of the relevant expenditures is available at the following excel file:StateCultureExpenditures2010
Looking at that you can in fact find that the State expenditure divide up in the following matter.
STATE BUDGET:
| Creative Arts | Museums & Heritage | Radio & TV |
| 3,536.9 M ISK | 2,473.9 M ISK | 3,218.0 M ISK |
Note: Radio & TV are not counted into the total Culture expenses’ sum. They are just included, since they are funded by the same ministry as the other two, and for the sake of comparison.
g) Local budgets
The net expenditures for culture of the local governments of Iceland can be found under the following database link: here. A summary of this table for the year 2010 can be found in this Excel file: menningsveit. The breakdown is as follows. LOCAL BUDGETS:
| Creative Arts | Museums & Heritage |
| 2,625 M ISK | 4,084 M ISK |
Conclusion
Looking at the year 2010, it seems to be the case that more public money is spent on sports (14.5 thousand million ISK) rather than culture (12.7 thousand million ISK).
Note: these numbers are of course approximate, although calculated with best intentions of maximum accuracy. Category “museums” includes art galleries and libraries. Insitutions which are primarily educational (Icelandic Arts University, sports faculties etc) are not included.