Sports volunteering as a social phenomenon attracts the attention of the world’s leading researchers in the field of sociology, psychology, and economics. Despite the large number of publications, research interest in the problems of sports volunteers is manifested periodically and, as a rule, precedes any specific sports event of an international or national level. The holding of the largest international competitions on the territory of Russia and the state interest in volunteering will determine the need for national and comparative research in the field of sports volunteering and the management of this type of activity. The aim of the work is to determine the place of sports volunteering in modern research on the basis of bibliometric analysis of publication data. The empirical research was carried out on the basis of the Scopus database in three stages: selection of documents by keywords, introduction of time frames (2005-2020) and selection of publications corresponding to the types of “article” and “scientific review”. The final sample consisted of 329 documents, which were analyzed in detail in the VOSviewer program (version 1.6.15). The authors identify the leaders of this research direction among specific organizations and countries. We analyzed the most cited publications on the topic of sports volunteering in the context of management. The authors identified thematic areas and their chronology in research, building a mental map of the most common terms. The results obtained make it possible to determine the degree of study of the phenomenon under consideration, to identify problem areas and promising directions in the study of sports volunteering. The problematic field of sports volunteering research is analyzed in the article from the managerial aspect. This formulation of the problem makes it possible to evaluate the scientific discourse of sports volunteering management at different levels: from interaction in a separate organization to the analysis of the practices of international and national management of the organization of sports events.