Sport in England

Major individual sports include badminton, athletics, tennis, boxing, golf, cycling, motorsport, and horseracing.

Supporters are more likely to carry the St George's Cross whereas thirty years ago the British Union Flag would have been the more prominent.

Rugby league is traditionally a winter sport, but since the late 1990s the elite competition has been played in the summer to appeal to the family market, and take advantage of the faster pitches.

These clubs participate in the County Championship, a two-tiered First Class cricket competition recognised as one of the oldest domestic cricket tournaments in the world, as well as the limited overs 50 Overs tournament (known as the Royal London One Day Cup for sponsorship reasons as of 2019) and the Vitality T20 Blast, which has notably helped in popularising the domestic aspect of the game.

The Hundred, a new franchise based and new format of the game was scheduled to begin as a domestic competition in the 2020 season, but has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Lancashire League was formed in 1892 and is renowned for the extensive list of professional players who have participated in it, particularly during the middle of the twentieth century.

The first organised indoor cricket league in the world took place in 1970 in North Shropshire,[6] and the first national tournament was completed in 1976 with over 400 clubs taking part.

By 1979 over 1000 clubs were taking part in indoor cricket in the UK, and it remains extremely popular today with many leagues around the country.

England won the 2003 Rugby World Cup, the first victory in the competition by a British team (or, for that matter, any Northern Hemisphere country).

The fourth- and fifth-place teams then played a one-off match, billed as the "Million Pound Game", for the final Super League place.

From 2009 through to 2014, Super League consisted of 14 franchises, based on renewable three-year licences, but that system was scrapped following the 2014 season.

The main knock-out competition is the Challenge Cup, which also includes clubs from France, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well as having featured teams from Canada, Russia, and Serbia in the past, and each year culminates in a history-steeped final at Wembley Stadium.

However, in 2018, the Great Britain national rugby league team was reformed after a 10-year hiatus in preparation of a tour of the Southern Hemisphere.

The Elite Ice Hockey League is well recognised around the ice hockey world, so much so that on 2 October 2010 the Boston Bruins of the NHL took on the Belfast Giants at the Giants Odyssey Arena in Belfast, Northern Ireland Lacrosse in England is played in both the men's (field & indoor) and women's (field) versions of the games and governed by English Lacrosse Association.

[9] As of June 2021, England's Alex Russell was one of two non-North American players on an NCAA Division I roster and the only one to see game action.

The graduate midfielder served as a captain for Long Island University, where he appeared in 11 games (10 starts), and recorded 20 points off 15 goals and five assists.

The nation has 56 clubs registered with the British Octopush Association and regular sees native born players compete for Great Britain.

During the 1970s, and 1980s there were as many as 85 GAA clubs in the London area and hundreds around Britain, but due to the fall-off in Irish immigration in the 1990s the number has fallen considerably.

The All England Open Badminton Championships takes place in Birmingham every year and attracts all the top players from around the world.

Since 2000 the British Superbike Championship has become increasingly popular, surpassing its four-wheeled rivals in terms of spectator receipts and television coverage.

In addition to Formula One successes, historic names such as Lola, March, Reynard and Chevron have supplied numerous teams.

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.

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.

Things slowly started to change when Michael Bisping came onto the scene and won The Ultimate Fighter 3 and earned a six-figure contract to the UFC.

UK MMA is being pushed further with the likes of Dan Hardy, Brad Pickett, John Hathaway, Jimi Manuwa, Rosi Sexton, and Luke Barnatt.

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 a good number of viewers.

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.

[20] In the early 20th century England had some of the largest sports facilities in the world, but the level of comfort and amenities they offered would be considered totally unacceptable by modern standards.

The venue was reduced to 60,000 seats following the Games after the London organising committee accepted West Ham United's bid to take over the stadium.

[citation needed] Budding professionals in the traditionally working class team sports of football and rugby league rarely go to university.