About a year ago, I posted a thread asking UK dopers about how football (a.k.a. soccer) in the country was organized. Among the responses was the fact that, counting both league play and tournaments, the typical football season lasted about 10 months. It led me to wonder about the popularity of other professional team sports (e.g., cricket and rugby) in the UK. In the U.S., there are four popular professional team sports: American football (the National Football League); baseball (Major League Baseball); basketball (the National Basketball Association); and hockey (the National Hockey League). Of these sports, American football is the most popular as exemplified by the fact that its championship game, the Super Bowl, ranks among the most watched American TV programs ever. However, the other team sports also hold their own in popularity. In contast, I got the impression from the postings about soccer that the sport completely dominated and overshadowed all other professional team sports in the U.K. in terms of popularity. Am I wrong about this? I’d like to find out whether other professional team sports in the UK still manage to get a healthy share of the sports fan’s attention there.
Football (soccer) wins hands-down in attendances and news coverage.
Cricket survives on sources other than gate receipts- attendances for non-international or non-finals events are ridiculously low. Cricket runs from April to September, but now is year long internationally since TV coverage is available of Southern Hemisphere, sub-continent and West Indies games.
Rugby Union is supported from local amateur clubs, through professional leagues to full internationals. Nothing like the attendance at soccer matches though.
Rugby League survives for now courtesy of TV money from Murdoch, and local support in the North of England.
Yeah, soccer dominates.
What Pjen says is substantially correct.
All I’d add is that attendance stats for rugby games vary enormously depending on the importance of the game. For instance, the top league match last weekend in the Rugby Union championship (Leicester v Northampton) raised an attendance of 16,845 and other championship games were watched by 10,200, 7,500, 4,700 and 3,200 respectively. But the England games v New Zealand, Australia and South Africa were each watched by 75,000.
The Rugby League season has been moved to avoid competition from soccer – next season runs from February to September. The best attended match in the regular season last year (Wigan Warriors v St Helens) was watched by 21,000, whereas their equivalent of the Super Bowl game attracted 61,100 and the final of the knockout competition 68,250.
In contrast, the soccer match between Manchester United and Arsenal this morning will have had an attendance of about 68,000. The FA Cup final last year attracted nearly 74,000 and internationals get a similar figure depending on the size of the stadium being used. The Football Association is supposed to be building a new stadium for big games to seat 90,000 and will have no trouble filling it. The big difference is that, in soccer, several clubs average well over 30,000 for club matches all season, whereas no rugby clubs get those numbers. Attendances in Division 3 of the football league (i.e. the fourth highest league in England) got crowds between 2,000 and 6,000 last weekend, which would be big crowds for club games in rugby.
In the 1940s and ’50s, cricket matches used to have attendances similar to football, but that seems hard to believe now. A county game might only attract a few hundred unless it’s an important one and an international no more than 10,000 per day for a five day match. It’s significant that I couldn’t find stats for cricket attendances online – they don’t want to draw attention to them.
We do have professional basketball and ice hockey too. 17,245 people saw the Manchester Storm v Sheffield Steelers ice hockey game in 1997 which Storm’s website claims is a European attendance record. I believe the highest ever attendance for a basketball game was 11,000. But those figures are freakishly high and the attendance in both sports has been falling in recent years – a big game might attract a couple of thousand tops.
Maybe it’s worth adding that the above comments apply to England and Wales – the situation is even more extreme in Scotland.
A population of only five million there supports a football league totalling 42 clubs (one of those is geographically in England). Only two of those clubs get really big attendances, but other sports hardly register on the radar. Rugby Union is a fairly popular sport to play, and attendances are pretty high for international matches, but are small for club matches. There is no cricket, no Rugby League and only marginal interest in ice hockey.
Celyn with her “Reporter from Scotland” hat on (yeah I know I’m not the only one, but I bet others are doing more sensible things on a Saturday eveing) 
Much as I hate to admit it, there is cricket, just not much I suppose.
http://www.cricketeurope.org/SCOTLAND/home.shtml
There seems to be a Rugby League too
http://www.scotlandrugbyleague.org.uk/
Aha - I just thought - does **curling ** count?
Probably a more sensible thing to do on the ice than ice hockey, 'cos that way the U.K. got Olympic gold.
There are also people who play US football, but I shouldn’t think there are many.
But football gets all the media coverage, to a silly extent, I’d imagine - though I’d think about the same as in England (with the exception of cricket - though a lot of the media likes to treat us to blow by blow accounts of English cricket. ( I know that my years in England I had exactly the asme impression that football dominated.)
Not sure if that ramble helps or not - IANA Sport Person.
Very good - 67,750.
And that is because that is the capacity of the stadium, presumably. The FA Cup final is always sold out.
In comparison, there are several college (American) football teams in the US that pull in crowds of 80,000+
Yes, that’s right. The FA Cup Final is traditionally played at Wembley Stadium in London, but that’s currently being demolished to make way for the 90,000-seater I mentioned before. The game is currently played at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, which is also used for rugby games.
For a variety of reasons, sports stadiums in the UK have had their capacity reduced in the last decade or so because before that some of the capacity was unseated – people stood on stepped terraces instead. Before all-seater stadiums were made mandatory Wembley had an official capacity of 100,000. I’ve been to several finals in crowds that size (in fact the largest crowd I’ve been in was for the 1986 final, which had an attendance unofficially estimated at about 116,000).
Hampden Park in Glasgow used to hold 150,000 at one time, mostly standing.
There aren’t any stadiums in the UK that hold that number of people at the moment, although the are expansion plans for a few. Collegiate sports are not highly developed in this country.
Hillsborough, Bradford…
You still can’t beat the atmosphere in crowded terracing. As recently as the early nineties there still used to be a small standing section at Twickenham. I don’t know if there still is. I saw England play France from that section in an England Grand Slam year. It was right by the touchline - when you get that close you get a real feel for the speed and bone-crunching nature of the game.
I never got to see an FA Cup final. I tried for tickets in 1972. Maybe it’s just as well that I didn’t get them as I was a Leeds fan, not a Sunderland fan.
I’m pretty certain there isn’t any terracing at Twickenham any more, but there is occasional murmuring that small terraces might return one day to some football stadiums (in fact there are still a few terraces at lower league grounds). I used to like terracing myself, although the reasons for removing it made sense of course.
I won’t miss the old Wembley though. It was cramped, inefficient and you couldn’t get a good view of the game because of the running track around the pitch. Of course you could forgive all that if your team won. It’ll be the '73 Final you recall – Leeds beat Arsenal in '72 thanks to Alan Clarke’s winner – it’s a pity you couldn’t get a ticket for that one.
<grumpy old fogeyrudely butting in>
Stadia !
</GOFRBI>
As you were folks!
everton: you are correct (except it’s Allan). Yes, I’d have loved to see the 72 final. Mick Jones to the goal line, pulls it back, Clarke’s diving header…
Celyn: you are not. “Stadiums” is valid. See http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=stadiums
Oh amaarone, you are spoiling my meagre fun - after making an informative, if boring, post involving the word “cricket” it is only fair to allow me to use the thread for a tiny, tiny bit of practice to be a slightly tongue in cheek grumpy old fogey.
Anyway - I am ** “not”**? OK - this sudden existential problem for me will be enough to deal with, and I 'll leave the racecourses, and stages of diseases and moultings of anthropods in peace.
Sorry. By reminiscing about a football match 30 years ago, I must be entering old-fogeyism myself.
P.S. One of the words in your final paragraph doesn’t exist. 
FWIW, I’m one of those people that alternates between “stadiums” and “stadia”, like a kind of John Motson v Barry Davies internal war. You must’ve caught me at the wrong extremity of the sine wave, Celyn. And having seen Scotland play both cricket and Rugby League I still have to say the sports don’t exist north of the border :).
I wonder if Mick Jones’s elbow has stopped hurting yet?
The one exception are the annual contests between Oxford University and Cambridge University, particularly the Varsity Match (rugby union) and the Boat Race on the Thames.
The Boat Race usually pulls in six million BBC viewers in the UK, with a global audience of 400 million.
Last year 50,000 turned up to watch the Varsity rugby, and it was live on Sky Sports which had several million viewers.
This level of interest is generally viewed with bemusment, especially considering the skill of those participating (usually v poor compared with the professional versions).
We’re still going to spank the Dark Blues on Tuesday though
Where as south of the border cricket and Rugby League are … heh, lips, please don’t unpurse.
Depends what you mean by “south” doesn’t it?
Just numbers alone don’t mean much. Manchester United get about 68,000 for a game spurs 36,500 yet the revenue is about the same as Spurs tickets are much more expensive.
Similarly, although Rugby Union crowds are quite small and prices lower than premiership football the clubs are extremely good at getting every last penny out of their rather well healed fans.
Cricket survives solely on the back of the England team.