More than 100 accidents worldwide have killed or seriously injured all or part of a major sports team, in team-related circumstances that often receive widespread publicity. This list is organized into two sortable tables, summarizing aviation accidents and non-aviation accidents. The list does not attempt to include infectious disease outbreaks, or teams that were targets of violent attacks, or countless athletes who experienced individual accidents.
The deadliest known accident for a single team was a November 1970 plane crash in West Virginia, whose fatalities included 37 members and 5 coaches of the Marshall University football team. Aviation accidents involving sports teams have decreased substantially since peaking in the 1970s, in parallel with peacetime aviation accidents overall. Serious non-aviation team accidents have most commonly involved buses, but also trains, boats, vans, cars, bicycles, bobsleds, avalanches, lightning, fire, bridge collapse, and carbon monoxide, without a clear trend toward improvement over the decades.
In response to team accidents, several sports leagues have established procedures for a "disaster draft", a contingency plan for rebuilding a team if many players are killed or disabled. The Kontinental Hockey League implemented such a plan in 2011 when the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash in Russia killed 26 players and 3 coaches, second only to the 1970 Marshall football crash.
(Click on date for associated article and references, where present.)
(Click on date for associated article and references, where present.)
A few notable sports-related accidents that don't quite satisfy the list criteria:
In addition, identifies and classifies thousands of individual fatalities related to sporting events.