Service-oriented reallocation and value-added intensity in China’s sport industry, 2018–2024: A longitudinal accounting analysis

China’s sport industry expanded while its composition shifted toward services during 2018–2024, but both the accounting mechanisms behind this change and the robustness of the pattern to the COVID-19 disruption and relative-price movements require careful qualification. We analyze annual national sport-industry accounts published by the National Bureau of Statistics of China and the General Administration of Sport. The analysis combines value-added shares, value-added intensity, a descriptive service-to-manufacturing value-added ratio, shift-share decompositions, alternative time windows, a proxy-based price sensitivity analysis, and crisis–recovery indicators. The service share of sport-industry value added increased from 64.8% in 2018 to 72.0% in 2024, while the manufacturing share declined from 33.7% to 26.5%. Aggregate value-added intensity rose from 37.9% to 41.7%. For 2018–2024, the decomposition assigns +2.50 percentage points to changes in category output weights, + 1.44 points to within-category intensity changes, and −0.13 points to their interaction. The between-category contribution remained positive in all alternative multi-year windows, although it was not always larger than the within-category contribution. Under the specified price-proxy scenario, the between-category contribution remained positive. Co-located services fell by 16.2% in value added in 2020 and rebounded by 24.6% in 2021, ending 4.4% above their 2019 level; education/training and media/information services did not contract in 2020. The published accounts therefore document a service-oriented reallocation over the observed period, alongside substantial post-shock within-category change and heterogeneous exposure across service activities. Because the series uses current-price data and crosses a 2023 census-benchmark break, the results should be interpreted as descriptive accounting patterns rather than causal estimates of productivity, policy effects, or pandemic mechanisms.