How big is Rugby League in the UK

[Sam_the_man]

As for New Zealand, if you go strictly by participating number then Soccer is number one in NZ then union then league.

 

[taste2taste]

There was an interesting article in the herald about the FNF ratings ..AFL v NRL

Basically it said the AFL is screened nationaly. In victoria it pulls huge numbers, Syd and qld it only rates well if the lions or swans are winning, otherwise it finshes last in the ratings, even the ABC often outrates it. It wins the ratings in Adl, Perth and tas but the market in those citys is very small. About 80% of the viewers are watching in Vic

League is only aired in syd and qld (very late at night in Vic) but because these are such huge markets, and league rates so well, it ends up that on an average friday night they pull almost excactly the same amount of viewers

The NRL GF gets considerably more viewers than the AFL GF, but this can be put down to 2 factors.
1-NRL GF is on sunday night, which is the peak time for ratings
2-Its the only time all year that league is televised live around the country, opening up the Vic,adl and perth markets.


cricket actually pulls the most viewers nationally

so i guess it goes
1-Cricket
2-AFL/NRL
then daylight

 

[S.S.T.I.D]

It's hardly enormous in Australia either. The Eastern Seaboard and a team in Victoria is it. When you've conquered SA, WA and Tasmania come back and have a go at the Brits, until then people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

SA and Tassie aren't worth the time. There is just very little to be gained by bothering. WA on the other hand is the final frontier in my opinion. When Perth are readmitted to the NRL the competition will be as national as it will ever need to be.

Anyhow, this isn't a discussion about the popularity of the game over here.

 

[eels_fan_01]

As for New Zealand, if you go strictly by participating number then Soccer is number one in NZ then union then league.

Soccer always has a high participation in juniors because its a pussy sport that parents put their little bitch kids into. Im pretty sure its the same in Australia btw but junior participation doesnt mean everything.

 

[Evil Homer]

IMO from what ive read and heard... in the UK soccer rules, obviously, and then sports such as RL, RU and Cricket chime in as 2nd sports in various regions. It would be almost impossible to try and predict which out of the 2nd tier sports are doing well, because that all depends on national succes... Cricket after the 05 ashes, Union after the RUWC win, if the English win the RLWC or the tri-nations, similar effects will occur.

In Australia, RL is marginally second, more due to the effects of the SL war and the general dislike from within media circle. The AFL is popular in some areas and is overall, slightly the no1 sport in Australia. I would say Cricket comes next, with soccer, swimming and basketball below that. Union is a joke, only matters when they do somethign that evokes 'national pride.'

Yeah, that's about right.

 

[deluded pom?]

Is the ESL shown on free to air TV in the UK? In Aus we have two games on a friday night and 1 on a sunday on free tv which attracts an enourmous audeince. The NRL believes this is very important to help grow the games fan support. If it was hidden away on pay TV i think League would be struggling a bit.

It's on satellite tv which you need to pay a subscription to watch.

 

[deluded pom?]

So some people reckon that AFL is the biggest sport in Australia? But doesn't RL have Sydney and Brisbane and the rest of QL and NSW? SA and Tasmania are not worth bothering about. So the mighty NRL gets beaten by a sport played only in Melbourne, Perth and a few other places and doesn't even have an international element to it? Well I never :shock:

 

[bowes]

overall rugby league is probably the 5th sport in the UK after soccer, cricket/RU (not sure which is second) and tennis. Excluding tennis as it's hard to compare it breaks down as follows.

Clubwise support:
attendance: 3rd after soccer and RU (slightly, but both roughly equivalent to 3rd tier soccer), though RL gets atrocious crowds in the south. However, the Challenge Cup final is the biggest club rugby game
TV audience: 2nd after soccer

Playing figures: far smaller than soccer, RU and cricket overall, probably behind them even in Lancashire and Cumbria (though not in some towns there), edges out union in Yorkshire

internationals support: soccer, RU and cricket all big, RL negligible

RL in the midlands where I live is far smaller than sports like basketball, ice hockey, american football and speedway, let alone the main sports

 

[deluded pom?]

Tennis is perceived as a middle class sport in the UK and very few working class people play it. They might dig out an old racket if by some good fortune a Brit makes it to the second week of Wimbledon but otherwise no one's interested in it. Basketball is another sport that has no real following outside of Universities. I don't know of one person who plays/watches basketball at all. American Football was a flash in the pan sport that gained popularity on the back of Channel 4's highlights when they first launched in the early eighties. A live broadcast of the SuperBowl soon turned people off. Very very few pople bother with it now and it is a very minority sport. Comparing RL in the Midlands is like comparing RL in Adelaide to RL in Sydney. It IS played there but on a very small scale. Soccer has the media by the balls and RU has the Old Boys School in the media. RL is doing very well when these things are taken into consideration and on the back of very little terrestrial television.

 

[bowes]

yes but the midlands is a very significant part of the country's population and the sport is effectively non-existant. In Coventry, which is home to the best team in the midlands at RL the crowds at the Bears are dwarfed massively by the crowds of the american football, speedway (okay this is not a fair comparison as it's pretty much the centre of speedway), ice hockey and probably basketball teams, let alone the RU and soccer teams. In the midlands there's three professional basketball teams, two professional ice hockey teams, four professional speedway teams and no professional rugby league teams. This is not just a midlands thing, most of the country is the same. The area where rugby league is more than a curiosity is only about 10% of the population. Even three of the five main northern cities lack a professional side (one even lacks an amateur side)

 

[Evil Homer]

To be fair, DP was right about the comparison between Sydney and Adelaide. In Rotherham, where there wasn't even an amatuer team until the 80's, I regularly see people walking round in RL jerseys and know plenty of fans of the game (obviously they only watch on television). Admittedly, Rotherham is a lot closer to the heartlands than the Midlands are.

 

[The Tank]

I was watching Hull City against Barnsley yesterday and commentators mentioned that City shared their stadium with rugby union club Hull FC. What was even more shocking was they went on to say they were Yorkshire born and bred. Is RL really that small that Yorkies can't tell the difference.

 

[deluded pom?]

That's just the contempt that the majority of the media hold the game in. Poofball fans barely know the difference between left and right let alone league and union. There are certain areas of Yorkshire where league is far from high profile but that's no excuse for poor journalism. You also could walk around Manchester or Liverpool and few people would have much knowledge of rugby league.

 

[S.S.T.I.D]

RL in the midlands where I live is far smaller than sports like basketball, ice hockey, american football and speedway, let alone the main sports

Holy sh*te!

 

[bowes]

Holy sh*te!

wasn't always the case. When there was a semi-pro team in Mansfield/Nottingham then the sport was a respectable (but not massive) size in the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire area. The idiots running the league decided to chuck them (and Blackpool and Chorley) out of the league just because they wanted to reduce from three to two divisions (even though they'd managed with that many teams in two divisions) and completely ruined it, the sport having since collapsed in the area, though recently Nottingham have been improving. Hopefully Coventry can get into the semi-pro ranks but it depends on the sponsorship. Currently noone really cares about the midlands as even though it has a relatively large population (10 million; which is higher than that of Scotland and Wales combined) and contains the second largest city (Birmingham with an urban area population of 2.5 million) it isn't either London or another national team.

 

[Evil Homer]

wasn't always the case. When there was a semi-pro team in Mansfield/Nottingham then the sport was a respectable (but not massive) size in the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire area. The idiots running the league decided to chuck them (and Blackpool and Chorley) out of the league just because they wanted to reduce from three to two divisions (even though they'd managed with that many teams in two divisions) and completely ruined it, the sport having since collapsed in the area, though recently Nottingham have been improving. Hopefully Coventry can get into the semi-pro ranks but it depends on the sponsorship. Currently noone really cares about the midlands as even though it has a relatively large population (10 million; which is higher than that of Scotland and Wales combined) and contains the second largest city (Birmingham with an urban area population of 2.5 million) it isn't either London or another national team.

I think we'd all like to see a team in the midlands, but there's been hardly any ground work in that area recently and as you say RL is virtually a non-entity there at the moment. A semi-pro Coventry team could be a success with the proper promotion, but would it be sustainable?

 

[bowes]

I think we'd all like to see a team in the midlands, but there's been hardly any ground work in that area recently and as you say RL is virtually a non-entity there at the moment. A semi-pro Coventry team could be a success with the proper promotion, but would it be sustainable?

depends on the sponsorship initially. Don't see how it would be any less sustainable than say Gateshead or the Skolars, though how sustainable the former of those is is up for debate

 

[taste2taste]

From reading this thread it sounds like the ESL has a lot of work in front of them to grow the game in the UK.
Was league more popular in the 80's and early 90's? I remember some of the players from that time were sensational (Hanley, Lydon, Offiah, Gregory..etc). Whenever there was any footage of UK game's shown over here (Aus) there always seemed to be packed staduims.

 

[deluded pom?]

The Sky money was a Godsend but also a double edged sword. the game needed the money before it went into meltdown but it also condemned RL to be screened almost exclusively to satellite television. The players you mentioned all played for Wigan who at the time were a full time professional outfit in a semi pro league. This had the effect of making the rest of the league spend money they didn't have trying to keep up with Wigan. Wigan were a fantastic team to watch but also the bane of RL in Britain. They were well known to the general public, moreso than today because they were in cup finals and at Wembley so often, all of which were televised on terrestrial television.

 

[JonG]

RL in the UK is seen as one of the top 5 sports.

Its a funny case in the UK, as most people don't know the difference between League and Union. If you were to ask someone to name an English rugby team, over 50% of people would say either Wigan or St Helens (excluding all those actively interested in league and union)

As previously mentioned, all uk-ers are bandwagonners. If an international team is doing well then everyone wants to be associated with it. Last years tri-nations had minimal media presence until GB beat Australia, then it soared - especially with the slating going on with Mason/Pryce etc...

League is way behing Union in terms of popularity, due to them having a better international presence, and having a head start. Up until 20-30 years ago League was banned in Universities, the main source for spreading the game nationally, and from the armed forces, the main source for growing it internationally. This has changed and we are starting to see growth at the lower levels.

The midlands is a good example, in the fact there used to be a semi-pro side that got kicked out, but now it is growing again from bottom up. There are numerous conference sides, some with their own playing pitches (i.e. don't share a ground/facilities with union), and schools are now starting to play it.

Tennis/Cricket, the other two, are popular come wimbledon/ashes but then die down after that. League is more or less all year round, but due to the media bias does not get the recognition it would normally deserve.

Union has higher crowd attendances atm, due to the double header. Last year 55,000 people packed into Twickenham for 2 games of Union. The RFU counted this figure twice as a home attendace for London Irish and Saracens. Bothe teams after that got crowds of 5k-8k, but their overall attendances were over 10k.

This year they have done the same, but the attendance was 37k, so an automatic drop there, and Leeds(corwds of 5-7k) have replaced Northamptonton (crowds of 10-13k), so there will also be another drop/

There are about another 4 clubs that have seen crowd attendances drop by over 20% so far this year.

UNion like quoting playing number of 1m. However a report issued by the RFU recently said that Adult participation had increased by 6000 people this year, and said this was a 6% increase - this means that their actually playing figures are around 100,000 adults.

Its all a smoke screen with union, kept up by the bias in the media, and until League gets the recognition is deserves then they will always be behind Union, regardless of the figures/facts