The EuroGames is a multi-sport festival for LGBTQ+ athletes, held under the auspices of the European Gay & Lesbian Sport Federation (EGLSF) and staged in a different European host city each time it runs. It has moved around the continent since the early 1990s.
This is an independent explanatory page. We are not the EGLSF and not an organiser. Anything official — including anything about future editions — comes from the federation, not from here.
The federation, and why that structure matters
The EGLSF is an umbrella body whose members are clubs, not individuals. That is the single most important structural fact about it, and it explains almost everything about how the EuroGames behaves.
A federation of clubs does not own a travelling roadshow. It awards an edition to a host, and the host — a local organising committee, usually built out of the city's existing LGBTQ+ sports clubs — runs it. The sports themselves are typically delivered by the local club in that discipline, using facilities they already train in and the rulebook their own national federation already uses. Nothing is invented for the occasion.
The practical consequences are worth spelling out, because they are unusual:
- The event is as good as the local club scene is deep. A city with a strong LGBTQ+ swimming club and a strong volleyball club can host a strong swimming and volleyball competition. It is not a franchise dropped into a venue.
- Continuity lives in the federation, not the event. The EGLSF's ongoing work — supporting member clubs, campaigning against homophobia and transphobia in sport, connecting clubs across borders — is the constant. The festival is a periodic expression of it.
- Hosting is partly a political statement. Where a federation of European clubs chooses to take a large, visible LGBTQ+ event says something about the continent, and it is read that way.
Where it sits in the wider calendar
Inclusive multi-sport did not start in Europe, and the EuroGames is one of several things people confuse with each other.
| Scope | Roughly | |
|---|---|---|
| Gay Games | Global | The founding event of the movement, first held in San Francisco in 1982, on a multi-year cycle |
| EuroGames | European | Held under the EGLSF, more frequent and smaller in scale than the Gay Games |
| Sport-specific championships | Usually European or global | Run by the international body for a single sport — swimming, football, tennis and others each have their own |
The Gay Games are the origin story. They were founded by an American doctor and decathlete who had competed at the Olympics, on a straightforward premise: an athletic festival with no qualifying standards, open to anyone, where inclusion was the entry criterion. The founders originally wanted to call it the Gay Olympics, and were sued by the United States Olympic Committee over the word "Olympic". The case went to the US Supreme Court, and the name was lost. That litigation is not a footnote — it is a reasonably precise measure of how the sporting establishment felt about the whole idea at the time.
The EuroGames grew out of the same movement on a European footing, with the practical advantage that a continent full of clubs a train ride apart can hold a festival more often than a global one can.
What an edition consists of
Editions vary enormously, and we are deliberately not describing any particular one. Structurally, though, they tend to be built from the same three parts.
A sports programme. Several disciplines running in parallel across a few days, each organised in ability divisions rather than as a single open field. This is covered properly on how the sport is organised.
A capacity constraint. The size of an edition is set by facilities — how many pool lanes, halls, courts and pitches a city can free up at once — rather than by demand. This is why hosts tend to be cities with substantial municipal sport infrastructure, and why individual sports fill.
A social and cultural programme. Opening and closing gatherings, club-to-club hosting, and a great deal of unstructured time in which people from clubs in twenty countries discover they have the same problems. For a significant share of participants this is the actual point, and the sport is the reason to be in the same city.
Why it still exists
The reasonable question about an event like this is whether it has been overtaken by progress. In much of Europe, formal legal discrimination in sport is gone, and elite sport has a small number of out athletes.
The answer is that the problem was never mainly at the top. It is in the under-14 changing room, the recreational league, the club committee, and the coaching culture at the level where almost all sport is actually played. Surveys of LGBTQ+ people's experience in sport across Europe have consistently found high rates of casual homophobic language, and — more tellingly — high rates of people who simply left. An event built on ability-banded, no-qualification amateur competition is aimed squarely at that, not at the podium.
There is also the geography. Europe is not uniform, and the gap between the most and least protective countries has widened rather than narrowed in recent years. See LGBTQ+ sport in Sweden and Europe for how that variance works and where to check the current picture rather than a claim on a website.