Yesterday we looked at the top 10 participation sports in Ireland. Today we go one step further and draw comparison to similar figures from England. There are some notable differences.
This is the list of the top ten most popular sporting activities in Ireland, based on interviews over the course of a year with 9,500 people. The figure represents the percentage of the 16+ population having played that sport in the previous week.
| Exercise | 12.2 |
| Swimming | 9.4 |
| Running | 8.5 |
| Cycling | 5.9 |
| Soccer | 5.9 |
| Dancing | 4.3 |
| GAA | 4 |
| Golf | 3.3 |
| Weights | 2.9 |
| Rugby | 1.4 |
The corresponding figures for England run through to April 2014 and record sports played in the past week by a proportion of 160,000 people interviewed in that single month.
| Swimming | 8.04 |
| Athletics | 3.33 |
| Soccer | 4.97 |
| Cycling | 2.18 |
| Badminton | 1.27 |
| Tennis | 1.21 |
| Equestrian | 0.77 |
| Squash | 0.74 |
| Cricket | 0.48 |
| Rugby | 0.46 |
Swimming and running remain to the fore in both countries but England does not count exercise as a separate activity, preferring to break down into very small percentage of figures of people who row, lift weights, run on treadmills and similar activities as separate figures.
Rugby does not feature in the published top 10 participation sports but we have excluded Bowls on the basis that the England figures treat it as a percentage of the population over 55 years old.
Sport England reveals that the trends within participation in England are similar to our own with running and cycling showing the largest single gains over the previous 12 months and swimming and golf among the three to have suffered the sharpest decline.
The positive to be drawn is that Ireland does appear to have higher participation rates in most of the sports though this may be a reflection of the broader time span over which the interviews took place.
