Sport in the United Kingdom
Sports play a prominent role in British life and many Britons make a great emotional investment in their favourite spectator sports. The most popular sport is football, which has an enormous lead over its rivals except in Wales, where rugby union is the national sport. Cricket is popular in England, but is less important in the other home nations. Rugby union and rugby league are the other major team sports. Major individual sports include athletics, golf, motorsport, and horseracing. Tennis is the highest profile sport for the the two weeks of the Wimbledon Championships, but otherwise struggles to hold its own in the country of its birth. Many other sports are also played and followed to a lesser degree.
The United Kingdom has given birth to more major sports than any other country including: Football (soccer), squash, golf, boxing, rugby (rugby union and rugby league), cricket, snooker, billiards, badminton and curling. It has also played a key role in the development of sports such as boxing and Formula One.
Structure
Domestic sport and international sport both have high profiles in the United Kingdom. The four home nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have separate teams in most team sports, but the United Kingdom sends a combined team to the Olympics, which is slightly inaccurately known as Great Britain.
The club competitions in most team sports are also are organised on a national basis (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) rather than a United Kingdom wide basis. There are various anomalies however, such as the participation of the three largest Welsh football clubs in the English league system.
The relative prominence of national team and club competition varies from sport to sport. In football, club competition is at the centre of the agenda most of the time because clubs plays more matches each year, but the four national teams are also followed avidly. In cricket the national team has a far higher profile than the domestic competitions, which are suffering from a fading profile. Rugby union falls between these two with very high profile international competitions and a strengthening club game.
In individual sports this distinction is less important and competitors are generally seen as representing the whole of the United Kingdom, although fans from the separate nations will often feel closest interest in their fellow nationals. A significant anomaly is that the United Kingdom sends a combined team to the Olympics, but separate national teams to the Commonwealth Games.
Administration and funding
The government department responsible for sport is the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. This department is headed by a cabinet minister, but the Minister for Sport and Tourism is not in the cabinet, and it is not a prestigious political position. It is often perceived that there is a lack of political commitment to sport in the United Kingdom: that prime ministers and other top politicians are keen to be photographed with Olympic gold medallists and other British champions, but do not consistently make sport a priority.
A large majority of the funding for elite sport in the United Kingdom is commercially generated, but this is concentrated heavily on a few sports. The Premiership football clubs had an estimated combined turnover of £1.25 billion for the 2003-04 season according to Deloitte & Touche, and British professional football's total income is in the region of £2 billion. Other major sports have a tunover in low nine figures or the tens of millions. For example cricket is highly dependent on its TV contract, which will be worth £55 million a year for the 2006-09 seasons.
Most sports other than the main team sports are heavily reliant on public funding. The government agency which funnels this is UK Sport, and its affiliates in each of the home nations, such as Sport England. These agencies are also responsible for distributing money raised for sport by the National Lottery. In 2005, UK Sport announced funding plans for the next few years which are more focussed than ever before on rewarding sports which have delivered Olympic success, and penalising those which haven't. UK Sport also provides money for the recreational side of the main team sports, even football.
Other sports benefit from special financial provision. British tennis is subsidised by the profits of the Wimbledon Championships, which run into tens of millions of pounds. Horseracing benefits from a levy on betting.
The role of sport in British life
Sport is also an important outlet for patriotism. The legitimacy of nationalism is even more strongly denigrated by much of the academic and media establishment in the United Kingdom than in other developed countries, due to post-colonial guilt, but sport retains a partial exemption from this suppression of patriotism. Such manifestations are however compicated by the mixture of sports competition at UK wide level, requiring British patriotism, and competition at national level, requiring separate English, Scottish, Welsh and Nothern Irish patriotisms.
British attitudes to sport include both arrogance and self-denigration. Arrogance in that it is felt by many Britons that elite British competitors should be the best in the world, perhaps because so many sports evolved in the United Kingdom. Self-denigration in that the actual amount of success achieved is often underestimated; the British compete in a huge range of sports and have achieved notable successes in many of them in recent times. Another example of self-denigration which is not based on rational analysis of the facts is the frequently heard assertion that The Premiership is "rubbish" because a few elite teams are more dominant than they used to be, whereas it has actually risen steadily up the UEFA league rankings since the late 1990s, and is now ranked second. Another noteworthy aspect of British sporting culture, often noted as a contrast with American and Australian sporting culture, is the fondness of the British for plucky losers.
At the recreational level, British sport tends to be characterised by a permanent sense of crisis about participation levels and facilities.
Sports media
Traditionally the BBC played a dominant role in televising sport, providing extensive high-quality advertisement free coverage and free publicity, in exchange for been granted broadcast rights for low fees. ITV broadcast a smaller portfolio of events. In the early 1990s this arrangement was shaken up by the arrival of pay-TV. Sky Television based its early marketing largely on its acquisition of top division English league football, which was renamed The Premiership as part of the deal. It has subsequently acquired many more top rights in other sports. However, Sky tends to focus competitions which can fill it's specialist sports channels on a regular basis, and many events are still shown on free to air television, especially annual and quadrennial events such as Wimbledon and the Olympics. There are also rules which prevent the certain listed events from being sold exclusively to pay television.
Radio sports coverage is also important. The BBC's Radio Five Live broadcasts almost all major sports events. It now has a commercial rival called TalkSport, but this has not acquired anywhere near as many exclusive contracts as Sky Sports.
The United Kingdom does not have a tradition of specialist sports newspapers, but all of the national newspapers except the Financial Times devote many pages to sport every day. There are also hundreds of weekly and monthly sports magazines.
Elite level sport
Elite level team sports
There are four sports in the United Kingdom which operate high profile professional leagues. Football is the most popular sport and is played from August to May. Rugby union is also a winter sport. Cricket is played in the Summer, from April to September. Rugby league is traditionally a winter sport, but since the late 1990s the elite competition has been played in the Summer to minimise competition for attention with football. There are also professional leagues in basketball and ice hockey, but while these have small but loyal fanbases, they struggle to attract attention from the general media. Many other sports have amateur leagues.
Football
- See main articles Football in the United Kingdom and Football in England.
The modern global game of football evolved out of traditional British football games in the 19th century. Football (or soccer) is the highest profile sport in the United Kingdom by a very wide margin. This has been the case for generations, but the gap is widely perceived to have increased since the early 1990s, and football's dominance is often seen as a threat to other sports.
The governing bodies for football in the United Kingdom are The Football Association (of England) and its Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish equivalents. These bodies run the national teams, the recreational game and the main cup competitions. They have however lost a significant amount of power to the professional leagues in recent times.
Club football is organised separately in each of the home nations. English football has a pyramid league system which incorporates thousands of clubs, and is topped by four fully professional divisions. The elite FA Premier League has twenty teams and is the richest football (soccer) league in the world. The other three fully professional divisions are the run by The Football League and include another seventy two clubs. Annual promotion and relegation operates between these four divisions and also between the lowest of them and lower level or "non-league" football. There are a small number of fully professional clubs outside the top four divisions, and many more semi-professional clubs. Thus England has over a hundred fully professional clubs in total, which is considerably more than any other country in Europe.
The two main cup competitions in England are the FA Cup, which is open to every men's football team in England, although only professional clubs ever reach the final stages, and the League Cup (currently known as the Carling Cup), which is for the ninety-two professional clubs in the four main professional divisions only.
Scotland has a similar but smaller club football structure. The main league has four divisions with a total of forty two clubs, not all of which are fully professional. The twelve team Scottish Premier League is dominated by the two "Old Firm" Glasgow clubs Celtic F.C. and Rangers F.C., which dwarf their rivals in support and financial resources. The two main cup competitions are Scottish Cup and the Scottish League Cup.
The top level league in Wales is the League of Wales. This league has a relatively low profile as rugby union is the national sport of Wales and the top three Welsh clubs play in the English league system. The main Welsh Cup competitions are the Welsh Cup and the FAW Premier Cup.
In Nothern Ireland the main league is the Irish Football League, which despite its name is open only to teams from Northern Ireland, as opposed to the Republic of Ireland. It has three divisions.
Each season the most successful clubs from each of the home nations qualify for the two Europe wide club competitions organised by UEFA, the Champions League and the UEFA Cup. England and Scotland have both produced winners of each of these competitions.
The four home nations compete separately in international football. The first ever international football match was between Scotland and England in 1872. The only major national team competition won by a British side is the 1966 World Cup, which England hosted and won.
Cricket
Cricket was invented in England and is regarded as England's national summer game. It is by no means equal to football in finance, attendance or coverage, but it has a high profile nonetheless. It is probably the second most widely covered sport, and the fortunes of the England team are closely followed by many people who never attend a live game.
There are eighteen professional county clubs, seventeen of them in England and one in Wales. Each summer the county clubs compete in the first class County Championship, which consists of two leagues of nine teams and in which matches are played over four days, and in several one day competitions. These clubs are heavily dependent on subsidies from the England and Wales Cricket Board, which makes its money from TV contracts and attendances at international matches. Each summer two foreign national teams visit England to play seven test matches and numerous one-day internationals. In the British winter the England team tours abroad. The highest profile rival of the England cricket team is the Australian team, with which it competes for The Ashes, one of the most famous trophies in British sport.
In Scotland and Northern Ireland, cricket is well established, but only as a recreational game. The Scotland team has however recently started to compete against professionals in one of the domestic one-day competitions.
Rugby union and rugby league
- See main articles: History of rugby union, History of rugby league, and Welsh rugby union.
Like football, rugby union and rugby league both developed from traditional British football games in the 19th century. Rugby union was codified in 1871. Rugby league was established in 1895 by a number of clubs which wished to be allowed to pay their players, and subsequently developed somewhat different rules. For much of the 20th century there was considerable antagonism between rugby league, which was a mainly working class game based in the industrial regions of northern England, and rugby union, a predominantly middle class game in England, and also popular throughout the other home nations. This antagonism has abated since 1995 when the International Rugby Board opened rugby union to professional players.
Rugby union is the national sport of Wales. The four home nations compete separately at international level, but Nothern Ireland fields a combined Ireland team with the Republic of Ireland. All fours team are among the top eight or nine in global rugby union. They take part in the main European rugby union competition, the Six Nations Championship, which also includes Italy and France, and regularly play the other leading rugby union nations, the "Southern Hemisphere" trio of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as other rugby playing countries.
Other team sports
Basketball is a minor sport in the United Kingdom. As of the 2004-05 season the top level league is the eleven team British Basketball League and second league is the twelve team English Basketball League. The teams are professional or semi-professional but have modest resources. British international basketball teams have not achieved any major successes.
Ice hockey is also minor sport in the United Kingdom. The main league is the seven team Elite League.
Hockey is a moderately popular recreational sport in the the United Kingdom. The Great Britain men's team won the hockey tourament at the 1988 Olympics. However British hockey has gone backwards since then, partly because of conflicts between the need to foster a combined team to compete in the Olympics, and the commitment of the hockey associations of each of the home nations to the retention of separate national teams to compete in other international competitions.
Elite level individual sports
Athletics
Golf
Modern competitive golf originated in Scotland. In the early 20th century British golfers were the best in the world, winning nearly all of the U.S. Open championships before World War I. American golfers later became dominant, but Britain has continued to produce leading golfers, with an especially strong period in the 1980s and 1990s. There are usually more British golfers than Americans in the top 100 of the Official World Golf Rankings relative to population, that is more than a fifth as many, but Britain has not yet produced a new major star of golf this century.
The Open Championship, which is played each July on a number of British golf courses on a rotating basis, the majority of them in Scotland, is the only men's major golf tournament which is played outside the United States. The most famous of these courses is St Andrews, which is known as "The Home of Golf". The PGA European Tour is headquartered in England, and plays far more events in the United Kingdom than in any other country. In international team competition the United Kingdom provides a large part of the European Ryder Cup team, which has beaten the United States team in four of the last five events.
Tennis
The profile of tennis in the United Kingdom is highly dependent on Wimbledon.
Motorsport
Britain is the centre of Formula One, with the majority of the Formula One teams based in England, and more world titles won by drivers from Britain than from any other country. The British Grand Prix takes place at Silverstone each July.
British drivers have achieved success in the World Rally Championship. The British leg of the competition is the Wales Rally Great Britain.
Boxing
The United Kingdom played a key role in the evolution of modern boxing, with the codification of the rules of the sport known as the Queensberry rules in the 19th century.
British professional boxing offers some of the largest purses outside the United States to a few elite professional boxers who become nationally known. British heavyweight contenders are especially popular, but most British world champions have fought in the middling weight brackets. The governing body of professional boxing is the British Boxing Board of Control. It is generally felt that British professional boxing is in decline in the early years of the 21st century. The reasons for this include: the fact that football now offers a relatively large number of sportsmen the chance to make the sort of income traditionally only available to world boxing champions, reducing the incentive for athletic youngsters to accept the greater risks of a boxing career; the acquisition of the rights to most major fights by Sky Sports, which means that fewer boxers become national figures than in the past; and the knocks the sport's credibility has taken from the multiplicity of title sanctioning bodies.
Amateur boxing is governed by the Amateur Boxing Association of England (ABA) and the equivalent bodies in the other home nations. British amatuers have only enjoyed a very modest amount of success in recent decades, partly due to the tendency for them to turn professional at an early stage. The amateur sport is in a very poor state, with dramatic declines in boxer numbers. Amateur boxing championships and international team matches, which were once highlights of the British sporting calendar, are now almost invisible to the general British sporting public. The ABA hopes that the success of Amir Khan in the 2004 Olympics will reverse this trend.
Rowing
Rowing is a well established sport in the United Kingdom, and is strongly associated with public schools and Oxbridge. The most famous rowing events in the United Kingdom are the boat race between Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the Henley Regatta, which is a major international competition, yet is more famous as a social event. In recent years the profile of the sport has risen due to British success in rowing at the Olympics, especially that of Sir Stephen Redgrave, who won gold medals at five consecutive Summer Olympics.
Swimming
Other individual sports
Other sports with loyal followings include snooker, which is popular with television companies as it fills swathes in the schedules at a very low cost, and also attracts good audiences. However, its popularity has waned somewhat since 1985, when nearly a third of the British population watches the conclusion of the celebrated Dennis Taylor versus Steve Davis World Championship final even though it ended after midnight. Darts is another British based sport with a fixed place in the attention of the British sporting public.
There are many other sports in which Britons compete, sometimes with success, but which only attract attention beyond a small number of afficionadoes during major events such as the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games, or when a British athlete does something extraordinary such as breaking a world record. Examples include judo, modern pentathlon, and sailing.
Elite level equestrian sports
Horseracing
- See main article United Kingdom horse-racing.
Horseracing occupies a key place in British sport, probably ranking in the top four or five sports in terms of media coverage. There are more than sixty racecourses in the United Kingdom, and annual racecourse attendence exceeds six million. The sport is run by the Jockey Club and the British Horseracing Board.
The two forms of horseracing in the United Kingdom are National Hunt, which involves jumping over fences or hurdles, and the more glamourous flat racing. National Hunt is a winter sport and flat racing is a summer sport, but the seasons are vert long and they overlap.
Classic British flat races include the Epsom Derby, the St. Leger Stakes and the Two Thousand Guineas. The highlights of the National Hunt season are the Cheltenham Festival and the Aintree Grand National.
Eventing and showjumping
The United Kingdom also played a key role in the evolution of three-day eventing and showjumping. Two of the four annual three-day event competitions classified as three-star events by the FEI are British, namely the Badminton Horse Trials and the Burghley Horse Trials. Badminton attracts crowds of up to a quarter of a million spectators on cross country day, which is the largest for any paid-entry sports event in Britain.
Great Britain at the Olympics
The United Kingdom competes in the Olympics as "Great Britain", even though this name is inaccurate as it omits to mention Northern Ireland. The British Olympic Association does not play as central a role in British sport as do the National Olympic Committees of some other countries.
After the 2004 Summer Olympics Great Britain was fourth in the all-time Summer Olympic medal table, although the majority of the medals are accounted for by some very large tallies in the first few Olympic Games. British medal tallies for much of the post-war period were generally considered disappointing, but the 2000 Summer Olympics marked an upturn and this was sustained at the Great Britain at the 2004 Summer Olympics when Great Britain finished tenth in the medal table. This was seen as a great success, and there was a victory parade through the streets of London. It was largely overlooked that the team had come fourth out of the five largest West European nations and had won less medals per capita than many other developed countries. The sports in which the British team has won most medals in recent Summer Olympics include rowing, sailing and athletics.
Winter sports only play a minor role British sporting life because the winters are not cold enough for them to be practised out of doors very much. Great Britain is not a leading nation in the Winter Olympics, but has had a few successes in sports such as figure skating and curling.
Disability sport
Major sports facilities
In the early 20th century the United Kingdom had some of the largest sports facilites in the world, but the level of comfort and amenities they offered would be considered totally unacceptable by modern standards. After a long period of decline relative to other developed countries British facilities have made a relative improvement since the 1980s, and this is ongoing.
National stadia
Most of the best stadia in the United Kingdom were built for national teams, and are not used at club level:
- Wembley Stadium (England football team) Currently being reconstructed with a 90,000 capacity.
- Twickenham (England rugby union team) About to be expanded from 75,000 to 82,000.
- Millennium Stadium (Wales football and rugby union teams) 75,000.
- Murrayfield (Scotland rugby union team ) 67,000.
- Hampden Park (Scotland football team and an amateur club football team) 52,000.
Northern Ireland's national stadium Windsor Park is much smaller with a 20,000 capacity.
Club football grounds
British football grounds are almost always football only facilities in which the spectators are close to the action. Since the late 1980s there has been a dramatic spurt of reconstruction and replacement of league grounds, which is ongoing, and the Premiership's facilities are among the best of any sports league. As of early 2005 there are approximately thirty all-seater club grounds in England with a capacity of 25,000 or more, and two in Scotland. The largest is Manchester United's Old Trafford, which seats 68,000 and is to be expanded to 76,000 by Summer 2006.
Cricket grounds
English cricket grounds are smaller than the largest in some other countries, especially India and Australia, but the best of them have been modernised to a high standard, and two new international grounds have been built in recent years. The largest English cricket ground, Lord's in London is internationally regarded as the "home of cricket".
Club rugby grounds
Rugby union and rugby league are both much poorer than football. Some clubs have good all seater grounds in the 10,000-20,000 capacity range; some have older grounds which are still partly terraced, and others share a football club's ground.
Golf courses
The United Kingdom has many world class golf courses which can accomodate crowds in the tens of thousands for major tournaments. The greatest concentration of these is in Scotland.
Athletics stadia
The provision of athletics stadia in the United Kingdom is very poor compared to most other developed countries. The main reason for this is that it is not considered acceptable to ask football or rugby fans to sit behind an athletics track. This means that athletics stadia hav eto be separatedly financed and this can only be done with public funds, which have not been forthcoming on a large scale. The largest athletics stadium built in the UK since the Second World War, the 38,000 capacity City of Manchester Stadium built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games was reconfigured for football only use after that event. The National Athletics Stadium at Crystal Palace in South London seats just 15,500.
Race courses
The best British race courses are world class. Ascot Racecourse for example is being redeveloped in 2005 and 2006 at a cost of £180 million.
Indoor arenas
In the United Kingdom there is no indoor sport capable of attracting five figure attendances on a regular basis, and this restricts the development of large indoor arenas. Nonetheless a number of 10,000+ seater arenas have been built in recent years and more are planned. These facilities make most of their income from pop concerts, but they occasionally stage boxing matches and other sports events. There are some specialist ice hockey and basketball arenas, but they only seat a few thousand.
External links
A website with details of UK stadia
An illustrated guide to British football grounds
Recreational, student and junior sport
Recreational sport for adults
Student sport
Apart from a couple of Oxbridge events, student sport has a very low profile in the United Kingdom. While universities have significant sports facilities, there are very few sports scholarships. The university most focused on sports provision is probably Loughborough University. Budding professionals in the traditionally working class team sports of football and rugby league rarely go to university. Talented youngsters in the more middle class sports of cricket and rugby are far more likely to attend university, but their sports clubs usually play a greater role in developing their talent than their university coaches. That said some sports are attempting to adapt to new conditions in which a far higher proportion of British teenagers attend university than in the past, notably cricket, which has established several university centres of excellence.
School sport
Sport is compulsory for all students up to the age of sixteen, but the amount of time devoted to it is often small. There are frequent complaints that state sector schools do to little to encourage sport and a healthy lifestyle. Over the last twenty years, it has become a cliche to complain about sales of school playing fields for development.
Sports culture is much stronger in Britain's fee-paying schools, and these schools contribute disproportionate numbers of elite competitors in almost all sports with the exceptions of football, rugby league and possibly athletics.
In addition to the many of the sports listed above, popular sports at school level include netball and rounders, both of which are played almost entirely by girls. However, in recent times schoolgirls have increasing played sports which are traditionally male, especially football.