Promoting the integrated development of “sports, culture and tourism” industry is not only a practical need for upgrading the consumption structure of the public, but also an inevitable requirement to meet the people’s aspirations for a better life. On the basis of constructing the evaluation index system for the development of sports industry and tourism industry, the entropy weight TOPSIS method, coupling coordination model, Kernel density estimation, Dagum Gini coefficient method, σ-convergence method, and spatial β-convergence method are applied to explore the spatio-temporal dynamic evolution trajectory, regional variability source and convergence effect of the coupling coordination degree of sports and tourism industry in 31 provinces in China from 2017 to 2024. The results show that the sports industry and tourism industry have an increasing level of association, the trend of the coupling coordination degree evolving to a higher level, and the regional variability of the coupling coordination development mainly originates from inter-region, followed by intra-region, and the hypervariance density is small. In addition, the degree of coupled coordination of the two systems has a good σ convergence nature, the national and intra-regional coefficients of variation show an overall decline, local fluctuations in the trend of change, and there is a spatial absolute β convergence trend in the degree of coupled coordination of the two systems, the speed of convergence of the west>central>national>eastern. Accordingly, this paper puts forward corresponding policy recommendations, with a view to providing empirical reference and theoretical reference for realizing the common wealth of urban and rural areas.
