Bull Mania wrote:
Wasn't it originally £30 million we were awarded. It was a huge sum. In normal organisations, heads would have rolled for losing such a substantial amount of funding.
IIRC participation has fallen amongst plenty of sports. I may be wrong on this but I think they changed the criteria on which it was judged too and the figures are only for age 16+ which doesn't help RL currently where attempts have been focussed on increasing child participation.
We're also hamstrung by the regional nature of the sport. I'm looking down the list of sports and struggling to find a sport as "regional" as RL. We have pockets of relatively high participation and then areas of no participation at all. I'm sure that this will impact on RL's national figures too.
When RL "lost" its Sport England money IIRC it wasn't due to a fall in participation it was due to it not meeting targets for increased participation. RL was no different to many sports in this regard following the rise and then fall of sporting participation after the Olympics.
Also the oft-maligned move from GB to England was for the Sport England money.
What the figures do show though is how few people in the country are involved in RL. Something which hamstrings the sport in my opinion. We need our version of 5-a-side football. We need Social Rugby we're virtually anyone can take part regardless of fitness, ability or unwillingness to get in a fight. There are some efforts to increase Touch Rugby which is great but they're pretty half-assed efforts at the moment. Touch Rugby is the way forward in my opinion but the sport has to properly get behind it at all levels and provide the funding and facilities for it to thrive. Just sticking some people on a random field on a Wednesday night with a couple of cones and a ball isn't good enough. We need the clubs to properly get behind it and make their facilities available. Same goes for the bigger amateur clubs. We need a social rugby league of touch rugby teams setup by workplaces/pubs/groups of friends and places where individuals can just turn up.
Only then will we increase participation post age 16.
