Is cricket popularity overtaking football right now in England? http://foxsports.news.com.au/story/0,8659,16278637-23210,00.html Is this a short-lived thing while Ashes are going on, or do you expect it to have some life? One theory I have is that this year, the Premiership had a break much shorter than usual. (Sven Goran Ericsson wanted Premiership to start early on August 13 to give England team rest before 2006 World Cup.) But there has been a bit of football overdose on the television, and the close Ashes series is bound to snatch some fans away from football. Speaking of football overdose (and not just Premiership overdose), it didn't seem too long ago when Liverpool beat A.C. Milan and they were immediately back playing qualifying matches for 2005-2006 Champions' League season. Not to mention the Confederations Cup was on the TV in between as well. It seems that football has just turned into a no-stop 365 day cash cow, and if it is overmilked, other sports like cricket may catch curiosity of some fans.
Football is the number one sport in England by miles. Even now, when the England cricket team are doing really well in the Ashes, I have mates who would do well to name an England player outside of Flintoff (And one or two might not even get him). It's got a high profile in the press at the moment and there are plenty of people talking about the series, but there are many more non-cricket watching football fans who wouldn't have a clue.
At the moment? No. In the future maybe, ever since SKY got involved and the Premiership was formed the game has been heading for a fall what with it’s over pricing and over paid fancydan foreigners any idiot can see that’s it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing falls over quicker than a French winger in a hair band. Premiership attendances are falling and now is as good a time as ever for England to have possibly to best Test Cricket team in the World, love it or hate it 20/20 is also generating interest and the future of English Cricket has never looked brighter. That said if Englands footballers qualify for the World Cup next year and mange to reach say the QF stages media coverage and public interest will exceed anything that the cricket authorities could ever dream of.
Your post is confusing. Do you mean football is not more popular than cricket at the moment? Or that cricket hasn't got a high profile in the press at the moment and it will get better in the future?
I shouldn't have quoted your post it was a straight reply to the question is cricket more popular than football? It's not at the moment but it maybe sometime in the future.
NO cricket is not more popular than soccer in England. Cricket is currently undergoing a spike in interest due to some exceptional matches and a long overdue recovery in the ability of the England team. Soccer will return to saturation coverage and is still easily the number1 spectator sport. Soccer's popularity does seem to be declining slightly after strong growth over the past decade or so. People seem to be tiring of the relentless fixture lists and increased commercialisation of the sport. Higher ticket/kit/TV fees leave the average soccer fan feeling ripped off thus further disillusioning them. At the moment the cricket coverage is on the back and front pages, and deservedly so as two of the greatest tests ever have been played back to back. For the last day of the most recent test (a regular working Monday) tickets went on sale early in the morning but so many showed up that over 20,000 were turned away at the gates. The scenes inside the ground on Monday were described as unprecedented in English cricket as 5 days of tension, drama, and first-class cricket built to a dramatic climax. However as other posters have pointed out, after the Ashes, soccer will return to its saturation coverage, particularly in world cup year. I personally find that sad and unhealthy for British sports in general. The contrast to the behaviour of these cricket players in the Ashes and typical overpaid soccer players couldn't be greater. In future years the Ashes is going to be on satelitte TV so this could well just be a golden summer for cricket. In general basic league cricket is not well supported and there is little money outside of the international set-up. Only hardcore fans take an interest in the county game but with the Ashes a large % of people have become interested, even the ones that aren't are aware that it is taking place.
Well no, its not more popular but as the last few posters have said ,at the moment there is big interest which i think is for three reasons, 1. we are bloody good again, 2. Its the ashes. 3. Its the best chance we have had in ages. Most test matches in this country do sell out for the first three days but come sunday and monday tickets are usually readily available. County cricket does have a hard time attracting big crowds which is why they introduced the 20/20 cup. A new exciting short form of the game to attract youngsters and bigger crowds. Though i will say (and i have said this before) that whenever England play a test series abroad, the numbers of England fans who follow them is amazing. In the Windies last year, you would have thought England were at home, with almost 17,000 to 20,000 Barmy army at every game.
i'd say alot went also though due to the fact it was in the caribbean, you know, nice weather and beaches and all that stuff. would that many go to new zealand (for example)?
Probably not the 17,000 to 20,000 they were getting in the caribbean, but probably at least about 10,000. Which is still very good for the other side of the world, plus you have to remember many ex-pats will go along as well which will swell the english contingent.
Thanks. Very good input by pretty much everyone, which goes along with what I had suspected anyway. Still, I think that football's popularity cannot continue forever after 2006 World Cup. I worry about its oversaturation with fixture congestion and extreme commercialization. Anyway, that's a topic for another thread, another forum. Speaking of commercialization: http://content.cricinfo.com/engvaus/content/story/216189.html
I think that football will always be more popular than cricket in England. The real reason is that there are more people willing to watch club games. Even teams down in the conference (5th tier of English football) will get bigger crowds than your average cricket county championship match.
It wasn't more popular than cricket not all that long ago. Cricket's referred to as England's second national game, and for good reason as it was exceptionally popular for the better part of this century. Football is likely headed for a fall in a number of ways - the changing of kit yearly, the high ticket prices (forget about going to an Arsenal match - pfff), the proliferation of competitions. Personally, I really don't even follow Arsenal in the Champions League because there's just only so much football I can watch. If you're a sports fan - and most people in Britain are sports fans, not football fans - you just can't be bothered watching 60 Arsenal matches a year when there's Wimbledon, or the Six Nations, or the Open, or Test cricket to watch as well. So the oversaturation of football, to the point of making the oldest association football trophy on planet Earth as a "consolation prize", is already hurting it. It doesn't help that football is incredibly uncompetitive and boring at the moment - if you're a supporter of a club not named MU, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool, why watch? So, with the phoenix arising from the ashes of English cricket, with England playing exciting, nail-biting, positive cricket and the centuries old tradition of cricket in English culture, it was always going to make a comeback eventually.
As an afterthought credit has to be given to Channel 4 for their excellent coverage, their camara work has been superb with the close-ups and super slo-mo replays they've taken the game to a different dimension people that I know with no previous interest are glued to the screen asking "has he hit that one?". The loss of terrestrial coverage may prove to be a big factor.
A lot is being made of the saturation coverage of football on TV, but is cricket not already there too? Every test match and one-day international is covered live (and rightly so) as is every England football match. But at the moment, on pretty much every day I get home from work there is cricket of one form or another on Sky Sports. Last night it was the county championship game between Yorkshire and Lancashire, but more often than not it's a one-day game of some sort. The big difference here is that when you watch football, the best players on the clubs are playing from the superstars of the Premiership to the top-scorers on conference teams. The same cannot be said of county games as England stars seem to very rarely play for their counties any more. The question to be asked here is that if the ever-increasing media exposure of cricket in England will produce the same antipathy towards the England cricket team as the England football team and spread to cricket in general? If you get home and there's cricket on TV every day, is it going to be less special watching the England team?
You're right, I was thinking about the same earlier. I know that a crowded calendar has had some cricket fans in India simply become disinterested in the sport. Yes, this in India, a cricket-crazy nation. There is always something or the other 1-day series going on. Few years ago, I remember asking a former diehard fan if he was following the New Zealand vs. India test match. He simply yawned and told me that he doesn't give a toss anymore, as an individual win/loss against an opponent that is not a big rival just doesn't mean much anymore. When India plays against Pakistan or Australia, a lot many fans would come out of the woodwork. In the old days, it used to be next to impossible to watch test matches between countries other than India. Now, it's not a big deal to flip channels and see something like "West Indies vs. Zimbabwe" on, stare for few seconds at the screen and change the channel with disinterest. The novelty factor is hardly there. I'm sure similar oversaturation for cricket exists in England. Speaking of football oversaturation (somewhat off-topic): I was speaking with few relatives in England the other day. Parents of some college going kids (or kids preparing for college entrance exams) were absolutely furious that the Premiership began so early this year. Some of them were caught off-guard hoping that they would use this break to have kids study harder for the exams, only to find the kids glued to Arsenal vs. Cheslea on TV in August! Not to mention the World Cup next summer, which means that football would be on pretty much non-stop from mid-August to early July 2006!
As long as England cricket actually remains, erm...good, then this will likely not happen. It's more than just a lot of games on TV. It's the endless loop of "analysis" shows, crap transfer rumors filling the airwaves, et al. At least if cricket's on TV, it's a live match. Although you are correct there is a lot of exceptionally meaningless one-day cricket, mostly produced for the Asian television audience (the Afro-Asian Cup being the latest example, as well as Sharjah, those hideous triangular tournaments). I hate one-day cricket with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns. http://football.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9753,1551650,00.html Pretty good article by Sean Ingle of The Guardian about football fans. Hate to say it, but he's got a point, and a good one.
Been reading about the football in the rags and most if not all of them are making comparisons with the cricket along the lines of bollocks to these overpaid twats let's get back to watching real sport, exciting times for the summer game.
Thanks for the article. Very painful, self-reflective reading in many parts. Particularly, this part: But very true indeed.
Some more numbers about how cricket continues to enjoy its resurgence. http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/engvaus/content/story/217640.html
Having seen John Salako (who the quote was attributed to) play, I can well believe it. Absolutely bust a gut when after a new contract, did absolutely sod all once he'd "earned it". Football is hideously overpriced, mainly, no solely because players are hideously overpaid. Mediocre players in the CCC are on £3000 a week. Mediocre ones in the premiership are on 10 times that. This season may well be the first one to see an across the board drop in crowds for 20 years. But is cricket poised to catch up? Not by a long shot. Like rugby union it is hampered by the fact that although interest in international games can by large, the club game is still small-time. County championship cricket attracts crowds on average lower than conference level, and even the popular 20/20 cricket struggles to match league one level crowds. Without the day the day club interest that football has, it's impossible for cricket to approach anywhere near the same level of importance. rugby union, which is slightly better supported, struggles because virtually all of the pro clubs are outside the big cities.
There you go. Further proof of cricket's surging popularity. When the women jump on the bandwagon, it's proof enough that it's popularity is going through the roof. http://foxsports.news.com.au/story/0,8659,16521033-5000061,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/eng_prem/4264936.stm There you go. Cash cow milkers becoming victims of their own greed and starting to get paranoid.
That being said, let's hope cricket and rugby union give football some competition. Not only because some of love cricket and rugby union (hi!) but because it's good for football. Football was in very bad shape in the 80s because cricket had been falling off for 20 years, and hegemony is almost always bad. Clubs got lazy, stopped even giving cursory maintenance to their grounds, let hooliganism run amok, and the willingness to improve the game on the field stopped too (although England qualified in 82 and 86 I'd say football was of a worse standard each go - I'm pretty sure England only qualified because they expanded the tournament). Football came back because after Hillsborough, there was a serious lack of confidence in the game. The result was new foreign stars, improved stadia, the Premiership and more football on TV. Now there's too many foreign stars, stadia have fallen behind yet again, and there's not enough Premiership on terrestrial. Cricket and rugby union are going to fill that void if they keep making hard efforts to improve their grounds, improve their play, and improve their accessibility to families and normal punters, through TV or night matches or things like 20/20 and the Twickenham Doubleheader. Football's always going to be top dog, but with so many clubs teetering on the financial brink, a 10% reduction in attendance and viewership because England's playing in cricket or rugby could spell hard times ahead.
