Sport in the United Kingdom
Sport plays 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 generally regarded as 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 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), tennis, 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 formally "Great Britain and Northern Ireland" but commonly referred to as "Great Britain". Competition between the home nations was traditionally at the centre of British sporting life, but it has become less important in recent decades. In particular, football's British Home Championship no longer takes place.
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, an English club in the Scottish Football League, and a Northern Ireland club in the Republic's league, the Football League of Ireland.
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 is much more widely followed than the county competitions, which are suffering from a fading profile, whereas in rugby league club competition generally overshadows international fixtures. 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 the home nations send separate 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 office. 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, and British professional football's total income is in the region of £2 billion. Other major sports have a turnover 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.
Athletics, and also most sports outside the top ten or so in popularity, are heavily dependent on public funding. The government agency which funnels this is UK Sport, which has affiliates in each of the home nations, for example 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 focused than ever before on rewarding sports which have delivered Olympic success, and as a corollary 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 are in the tens of millions of pounds each year. 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 complicated by the mixture of sporting competition at UK wide level, requiring British patriotism, and competition at national level, requiring separate English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern 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 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. Supporters of London's successful bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics argue that the event can transform the level of participation in sport in Britain, but their opponents argue that the costs of hosting the Olympics may actually be funded in part by a reduction in expenditure on grass roots facilities.
Sports media
The British media is dominated by national outlets, with local media playing a much smaller role. 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. BSkyB 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 on competitions which can fill its 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 regulations which prevent 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. BBC Local Radio also provides extensive coverage of sport, giving more exposure to second-tier clubs which get limited national coverage.
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 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 is the single-division, twelve-club Scottish Premier League (SPL), which is dominated by the two Old Firm Glasgow clubs Rangers F.C. and Celtic F.C. who dwarf their rivals in support and financial resources. Below the SPL is the Scottish Football League, which has three divisions with a total of thirty clubs, not all of which are fully professional. 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 football clubs play in the English league system. The main Welsh Cup competitions are the Welsh Cup and the FAW Premier Cup.
In Northern 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 UEFA 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. The same teams also play the one day National League, a one day knock out competition called the C&G Trophy, and the short-form Twenty20 Cup. 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 the National League.
Rugby
- See main articles: History of rugby union, Welsh rugby union, Rugby league, and History of rugby league.
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, which is a predominantly middle class game in England, and is also popular in the other home nations. This antagonism has abated since 1995 when the International Rugby Board opened rugby union to professional players.
Rugby union
Rugby union is generally regarded as the national sport of Wales. The four home nations compete separately at international level, with Northern Ireland fielding a combined Ireland team with the Republic of Ireland. All four teams are among the top eight or nine in global rugby union. They take part in the main European international 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. England won the 2003 Rugby Union World Cup, the first victory in the competition by a British team.
The main rugby union club competition in England is a 12-team league called the Guinness Premiership, and there is also a cup competition, the Powergen Cup. Attendances at club rugby in England have risen strongly since the sport went professional. By contrast, the professional era has had a traumatic effect on the traditional structure of club rugby in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as the clubs lacked the financial resources to compete with their English and French rivals. The three countries now share a single top flight rugby structure made up of regional teams: four from Wales, four from Ireland and three from Scotland. These teams play in the Celtic League and the Celtic Cup.
British club and provincial rugby sides also take part in the two European wide club rugby competitions, the Heineken Cup and the European Challenge Cup.
Rugby league
The governing body of rugby league in the United Kingdom in the Rugby Football League. Overall rugby league is a smaller sport than rugby union in the United Kingdom, but it draws good crowds in its heartlands in Yorkshire and North West England, and is popular with armchair sports fans nationwide. The top level league is the twelve team Super League. Eleven of the teams are based in the heartlands, and one is in London. Below this level are the National Leagues, consisting of three divisions, each with ten teams. There is promotion and relegation between Super League and the National Leagues. The main knock-out competitions is the Challenge Cup, which also includes clubs from France and Russia.
Rugby league is also played as an amateur sport, especially in the heartland areas, where the game is administered by BARLA. Since the rugby union authorities ended the discrimination against playing rugby league amateur numbers in the sport have increased, particularly outwith the heartland areas. Through competitions such as the Rugby League Conference the sport is heading towards a national spread, at amateur level at least [1].
Internationally, only England (and sometimes Wales) field truly competitive teams in international rugby league. For many tournaments the home nations are combined to compete as Great Britain. The Great Britain team won the Rugby League World Cup in 1954, 1960 and 1972, but England and Wales now compete separately in this tournament and Australia has held the title since 1975.
The Great Britain team competes with Australia and New Zealand in the more recently founded Tri-Nations competition, but the two tournaments played so far were both won by Australia. Great Britain also competes as a single team in test series such as the Ashes (against Australia) and the Baskerville Shield (against New Zealand).
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 a minor sport in the United Kingdom. The main league is the seven team Elite League.
Hockey is a moderately popular recreational sport in 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
Athletics does not have a very high profile in Britain on a week-in week-out basis, but it leaps to prominence during major championships. The level of attention received by successful British athletes is illustrated by the fact that the have won far more BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards than practitioners of any other sport. The governing body of British Athletics is UK Athletics. There are also semi-independent athletics associations in each of the home nations.
Over the last few decades British athletes usually won between one and three gold medals at the Olympics. Traditionally Britain was strongest in men's athletics, especially middle distance running, but over the last 20 years success has been achieved in a wide range of events and British women have closed the attainment gap on the men. However, there remain serious concerns about the depth of the sport Britain, with the number of club athletes reportedly in decline.
Two high profile annual athletics events are the London Marathon and the Great North Run, which is a half marathon.
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 to say more than a fifth as many, but Britain has not yet produced a major new golf star 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 of 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 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
Tennis is yet another sport which originated in the United Kingdom, but it has not flourished there in recent decades, and its profile is highly dependent on the Wimbledon Championships. However, no British man has won Wimbledon since 1936 and no British woman since 1977. The governing body of the sport is the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), which invests the vast profits from the tournament in the game in the hope of producing British champions, but one relaunch after another has failed to raise the standard of British players. The only British players of either sex to reach the world top 50 in recent years are Greg Rusedski, who learnt his tennis in Canada, and Tim Henman, who did not pass through the LTA system either. Outside of Wimbledon fortnight tennis's profile in Britain is low, apparently in long term decline, and largely dependent on the two aforementioned players who are approaching retirement.
"Great Britain" or "British Isles" teams have won the Davis Cup nine times, but all of them were before World War II and there is no prospect of another victory in the foreseeable future.
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.
Major motor racing series based in the UK include the British Formula Three Championship and the British Touring Car Championship.
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 knock 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 amateurs have only enjoyed a very modest amount of success in international competition 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 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
The swimming organisations of the home countries have recently formed an umbrella organisation called British Swimming. Britain sends large teams to all the major international swimming events, and enjoys some successes, but it is not currently a leading swimming nation. The sport's profile is highest during the Commonwealth Games, when British swimmers have their best chance to win gold medals, and during the Olympics.
The provision of 50 metre pools in the United Kingdom is very poor for a developed country, with just thirteen as of early 2005, with ten more planned. There are however far more 25 metre short course pools and other sub Olympic-size competition pools.
Other individual sports
Other sports with loyal followings include snooker, which is popular with television companies as it fills swathes of their 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 watched the conclusion of the celebrated Dennis Taylor versus Steve Davis World Championship final even though it ended after midnight. Darts is another British centred sport with an assured place in the attention of the British sporting public.
There are many other sports in which Britons compete, sometimes with success, but which do not receive much attention outside a small number of afficionados except 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 cycling (the Tour of Britain cycle race was reinstated into the sporting calendar in 2004), judo, gliding, 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 attendance 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 very long and they overlap.
In flat racing the three races which make up the Triple Crown are the Two Thousand Guineas, the Epsom Derby, and the St. Leger Stakes. Other leading flat races include the One Thousand Guineas and the Epsom Oaks. Apart from the meetings at which the aforementioned races are staged, major flat racing meetings include Royal Ascot, Glorious Goodwood, and the Ebor Festival at York Racecourse. 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 given the highest classification 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 some other National Olympic Committees play in their nation's sporting life.
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 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, cycling and athletics. London hosted the Summer Olympics in 1908 and 1948 and will do so again in 2012
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 at 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. Wembley has also been used by the Great Britain rugby league team, and for major club matches in that sport.
- 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, which is actually a club ground leased by the Irish Football Association, 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 30 all-seater club grounds in England with a capacity of 25,000 or more, and three in Scotland. The largest is Manchester United's Old Trafford, which has a capacity of 68,000 and is to be expanded to seat 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 clubs are generally poorer than their football counterparts. Some clubs have good all seater grounds in the 10,000-25,000 capacity range; some have older grounds which are still partly terraced, and others play in council-owned joint-use stadia (eg. the Galpharm Stadium). Some clubs (mostly rugby union ones) rent stadia from football clubs.
Golf courses
The United Kingdom has many world class golf courses which can accommodate crowds in the tens of thousands for major tournaments. The greatest concentration of these is in Scotland. The Open Championship is always played over a links course, the most famous venue being the Old Course at St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland. The Belfry in the English Midlands has hosted the Ryder Cup more times than any other site. Wentworth Club near London is the only venue which hosts two European Tour events each season.
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 have to be separately 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 largest existing stadium is the 25,000 seat Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield. London's largest athletics venue is Crystal Palace, which has just 15,500 permanent seats. It will be superseded by the Olympic Stadium, which will be built as an 80,000 seater for the 2012 Summer Olympics but will be reduced to 25,000 seats after the Games.
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 £185 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. Currently the largest is the MEN Arena in Manchester, but it will be surpassed by the Millenium Dome in London will have a capacity of over 20,000 when it reopens in 2007. There are some specialist ice hockey and basketball arenas, but they only seat a few thousand spectators. Several of the 2012 Olympic arenas will be relocated outside London after the Games.
External links
- A website with details of UK stadia
- An illustrated guide to English football grounds
- An illustrated guide to Scottish 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 union 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 stronger in independent schools in the United Kingdom, 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 already mentioned, popular sports at junior level include netball and rounders, both of which are played almost entirely by girls. However, in recent times schoolgirls have increasingly played sports which are traditionally male, especially football, but also others such as rugby.