I look at France, Australia and the US as three examples; they all have a very healthy and thriving sports culture. France of course have one of the top football leagues in the world, the top Rugby Union league in the world, and a very healthy basketball culture which regularly produces top NBA talent and regularly makes the finals in international tournaments.
Australia has the AFL, NRL (rugby league,) BBL (cricket,) a revitalised Wallabies (even if domestic rugby union is struggling) and the NBL which also regularly produces NBA talent and acts as a feeder system to the NBA.
The US, no explanation needed. Four premier sports leagues and football (soccer) rapidly growing in popularity. Not to mention their entire college sports system.
Meanwhile in the UK, it seems like every team sport besides football is in constant financial turmoil. Cricket is struggling to win young fans and the Hundred competition has not exactly been a roaring success. Rugby Union is struggling at a domestic level with clubs going bust, Rugby League is dying on its arse; the quality and popularity is trending downwards compared to the 90s and 2000s.
What else is there? And don't give me pub sports like darts and snooker. Why are three of our top four team sports in such decline? Why are the powers that be so incomplete when it comes to making these secondary and tertiary sports a commercial success?
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I mean, football is pretty much fucked too. Outside of the Premier League and it’s ‘product’
Football’s feeling it too, look at Morcambe and Sheffield Wednesday.
I think football has more fat than the other sports so is able to survive longer during the financial Issues
You don’t think that UK football is more a business than a sport in financial turmoil?
No money to watch them, they’re not shown on bbc either, and the class reality of playing them.
I used to play cricket competitively and trying to get into the borough and county teams as an under 12/13 was a nightmare because even if you were good enough, if your dad wasn’t mates with the coach or whatever there was no chance getting in.
Rugby has also always been a middle/upper middle class sport so I imagine the barrier for entry is similar.
TV money, premier league football teams as billionaire play-things/ status symbols, that’s probably it.
Most clubs below PL are in financial turmoil. Probably half of PL are behind the scenes.
As a big rugby union fan, you’re forgetting the game was made professional very recently, and the trend between when football became professional and rugby is much the same, the money end of things wasn’t stable so a few clubs went bust, players took a pay cut and a few other things happened, it’s just part of the sport becoming professional. Can’t answer for anything else tho
Uk as a small population but has a lot of wide selection of sports – and the youth of today would rather watch someone playing a computer game on a streaming site than get out and about
TV deal for rugby in France is very good. Our TV deals means you need loads of different providers to watch all the different games and it’s very expensive
Comparing British premiership rugby and top 14 / French rugby is so painful. I think much of the success of French rugby is that it is not perceived as a posh sport, so all people support their local team. My god, the atmosphere at somewhere like Toulon compared to the stoop is just light years ahead.
This might be a ramble of random thoughts on the subject but
It’s probably because as a culture football takes up almost all space for people to watch, play and read up on.
Part of this is probably cultural where rugby and cricket have been for some time very much seen as posh boy sports. However there’s a lack of vision by the people leading other sports to get people involved.
Did the LTA take advantage of having the Murray brothers winning titles? Nope
Didn’t rugby bosses reject a netflix deal when all the docuseries were starting?
I’m not sure if there’s a similar issue like the 3pm blackout that football has but if not, getting games on free to air tv will make it much easier for people to watch both the cricket and rugby.
There’s also competition from US sports on our tv now. The NFL plays more games in London and Sky shows the whole season. MLB have also played in London and BBC iplayer and TNT show games.
There’s also more football games than ever before and its costing people more so people are spread like butter over too much bread.
Cricket is weird and a bit shit. Especially to watch.
I don’t see any lack of enthusiasm for football. Very popular to play in my kids primary school. They aren’t keen on watching it though.
I don’t see financial issues as an issue for anyone but the owners.
Football dominates the UK (especially Scotland then England, Wales and NI in that order more or less) to the extent that it almost completely crowds out other sports.
The other countries you list aren’t dominated by any particular sport to the same extent.
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Honestly I think businesses/sporting clubs etc now have their chickens coming home to roost. CEO’s, stakeholders, and board members have subscribed to the economic model of sequential year-on-year profits and it’s starting to look like it isn’t viable to expect to make even more money each year without some sort a ceiling. It’s just greed.
Football not in financial turmoil? Are you sure? Barcelona – one of the biggest clubs in the world – has entered the chat….
I don’t understand either. All of them are “struggling”
I think sport is the tip of the iceberg. I think a lot of things are due a fall and soon.
Wages are poor, lay offs at record levels, job vacancies at record lows, and companies that expect to grow year on year, thinking it was a sustainable trend.
Well here’s news, people’s money and patience is running out. I feel like society in general is overdue a correction and we’re starting to see the early signs of it. We’re expected to pay more and more for less and less and people are sick of it.
People have been saying it for years now but greed will be the downfall of modern society. Personally I say bring it on.
Participation. When I left Australia in ’99, basketball wasn’t a big thing commercially, but more amateurs played it than any other sport.
The various footballs have their own communities, so the best athletes are split between the various disciplines; what ballgame is being played in the winter in parks depends on which state or suburb you are in.
And in summer it’s cricket. All the cousins stuck in the backyard after Christmas dinner, we play with the brand tipity-runs new cricket set that someone has inevitably found under the christmas tree.
But here (at least England) it’s always football. Summer or winter, football. Every time I have seen kids playing cricket in a park, they are Asian or (I assume) of Caribbean heritage. And even adults seem to mostly do five-a-side if they play any organised sport.
So yeah, it’s just football.
The main issue in the UK is there are too many professional teams chasing too few supporters.
I mean, in the USA there are 32 x teams vying for the Superbowl. We have 92 clubs, and then also a massive non-league set up so big it needs a pyramid.
Same across other sports for a population of 60 million-ish.
I mean too many financially and answering the OP, I am in NO means advocating we lose any. I love the setup we have.
As it ever was, state schools just don’t do anything other than football because of space and cost of equipment. You can watch as much as you want but if you never actually get the opportunity to try, how do you get involved?
Joining a club is expensive, and unless you start when you’re 6, there’s nowhere really to start out and get good because of the expectation to compete right away.
French football, FYI, is in huge turmoil. Their entire TV broadcasting deal recently fell through. Multiple big clubs have fallen into administration and slipped into obscurity in the last 3 or 4 years.
This whole post reeks of “locality bias”. If you hear a lot about the sorry state of UK sports from UK media, and not much about French sports… it inherently seems like things are better over the channel.
Isn’t the Hundred picking up a ton of foreign investment? I hate what it means for Cricket, but it’s hardly a failure. It actually feels like the sort of thing you have to do when young people increasingly have the attention span of a newt living in a pond of red bull.
Basketball is an American sport, and I think one of the worst ones ever invented. If we’re bad at it, so what. If it has the huge UK player base people claim then it will generate its own success anyway. Cherry picking it as some measure of success outside the USA is weird, you might as well ask how much baseball talent we produce.
Most football clubs lose money year on year aswell.
Never played rugby at my comprehensive, never got into it at all and don’t even really know the rules (or care to). Cricket similarly, never had enough kids to get a game going and it’s slow and boring to play (fielding is the most boring thing to do on a summers day).
Football on the other hand wasn’t just played, but embedded culturally from childhood (football stickers, shirts, match of the day etc).
I expect there’s more money in UK sport overall than there is in France/Australia. Worth mentioning that tennis, golf, and F1 are very popular in the UK and do well financially as well.
Football just completely dominates the sports scene and takes the vast majority of the audience/money. It’s #1 by a much larger margin than the US’ #1 sport, and the US is also a much larger country so more able to financially support multiple sports too.
Couple that with trying to compete elsewhere, trying and failing to attract new audiences, and the general economic situation affecting how much people are willing to spend on sport and yeah it makes sense there would be issues for some.
Only way to fix it is to either get more people watching and spending money on those sports (difficult when people have less disposable income and there’s already a hyper-dominant sport to compete with), or accept that they’re not as big as they used to be and cut down on spending to a more sustainable level.