The present study aimed to investigate the effect of ethical marketing and service quality on attracting customers to private sports clubs in Ardabil province. The statistical population comprised all customers and visitors of private sports clubs in Ardabil province. Due to the large and indefinite size of the population, the sample size was determined based on the Cochran formula for an infinite population, resulting in 384 participants who were selected through convenience sampling. Data were collected using a questionnaire that was adapted from the Liu (2008) sports club service quality evaluation questionnaire and the Safari et al. (2017) ethical marketing questionnaire, scored on a five‑point Likert scale. To ensure the validity of the instrument, face and content validity were confirmed by five university professors, and reliability was established using Cronbach's alpha coefficients. Structural equation modeling (SEM) with path analysis in AMOS (version 23) and SPSS (version 26) was employed to examine the causal relationships between the variables. The findings indicated that the two independent variables of ethical marketing and service quality together explained 59% of the variance in customer attraction, which represents a large effect size. Specifically, ethical marketing had a positive and significant effect on attracting sports customers (β = 0.69, p < 0.001), and service quality also had a positive and significant effect (β = 0.53, p = 0.002). Based on these results, it can be concluded that improving both ethical marketing practices and service quality in private sports clubs can substantially enhance customer attraction.