Against the backdrop of the national strategy to promote a strong sports nation, leisure sports, as an important component of sports science, its development patterns hold significant importance for scientifically grasping the development trends of leisure sports in China. Utilizing big data analysis technology to systematically comb through the development process of leisure sports helps reveal the evolutionary patterns of China’s leisure sports research work. Moreover, the visualization capabilities of knowledge graphs, when applied to data organization and statistics in the current state of leisure sports research, not only clearly display the development trajectory of China’s leisure sports scientific research efforts but also actively promote and guide the construction of China’s sports science research knowledge system. This study employs literature review and bibliometric methods, using the CiteSpace 6.2R6 tool for bibliometric analysis and visualization of research literature in the field of leisure sports. The results indicate: (1) the publication volume of leisure sports in core journals from 2011 to 2024 shows a wavy downward trend; (2) research institution cooperation relationships are relatively singular, with weak relational networks, primarily focused on regional cooperation; (3) there are few core authors, small team sizes, and loose connections among authors; (4) themes such as leisure sports behavior, built environment, sports tourism, and deep leisure have become research hotspots in this field; (5) Themes like deep leisure, deep leisure traits, and built environment maintain significant research potential in future studies.