With improved living standards, participation in sports events has surged, the number and scale of global sports events have been expanding, and the impact of sports events on the water environment has become increasingly prominent, triggering extensive concern and in-depth discussion among scholars across various disciplines. However, the existing research mostly focuses on individual case analysis or single-dimension exploration, lacks a systematic analysis of the macro structure, knowledge map, and evolution path of the research field of sports events and water environment, making it difficult to comprehensively describe research development trends of sports events and water environment, etc. In this study, articles about sports events and water environment in Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) from 2015 to 2025 were screened, and after the second screening, bibliometrics research methodology was used to visualize and analyze research hotspots and development trends, etc., of sports events and water environment in the last decade. Based on the Citespace study, it is found that the number of articles published on sports events and water environment research has shown significant growth in the past decade, and Chinese research cooperation in this field occupies a major position; the distribution of disciplines shows obvious multidisciplinary intersection characteristics, in which environmental sciences (34.57%) and water resources (25.03%) constitute the main body of the research, and the research topics of interest among scholars are different, and high impact journals are not always cited by the high impact factor. In addition, we analyzed the major scholars and institutions involved in this field of research, as well as the keywords that emerged for visual presentation, helping researchers to quickly and accurately understand the authoritative scholars and research hotspots, etc., in this field through this paper, providing a data-driven and objective frame of reference.