According to the latest Sport England survey the participation numbers for RL are shrinking.

Is this true ? and if it is then does it put our much vaunted funding package at risk ?

[url=http://www.sportengland.org/research/active_people_survey/active_people_survey_3/detailed_sport_results.aspx?sortBy=alpha&pageNum=2Survey Results Downloads[/url

It will truly be the results of the study, but whether they are an accurate reflection of the situation of the ground, I'd question. If they are, it is pretty catastrophic - a fall from 88k in the year to october 2008 to 63k in the year to october 2009. When you get a result that dramatic, you have to look very closely at the methodology. Here we are talking about telephone interviews with 191,000 adults. Over recent years the number of positives has varied between 0.2% and 0.15%, which is then extrapolated up for the population of England. The total number of positive respondents is therefore about 380 at best, falling to about 285 over the course of the year. 191,000 is a decent sample size and they can't be criticisized for that, but when identifying rare events you are going to get random fluctuations. There are all sorts of other possible confounding factors - things like different people conducting the survey and scoring it slightly differently based on their personal interpretation of the criteria (respondents are likely to equivicate quite often). Small differences in assessments, when extrapolated 300-fold will make it look like 1000s of players have suddenly appeared or disappeared.
I personally doubt it is a real problem (Union jumped from 0.46% to 0.56%, before drifting down again), but politically it might be. Politicians like stats - they are a quick, easy way to sound like an expert, and they can be made to sound incontrovertible while actually being conveniently malleable.

BTW, we can accept that there is a statistically significant change as they state, while still believing it is an overestimate. Personally, I don't trust it much - I'd not trust it if we suddenly found 25k players either, although I'd maybe stay a bit quieter about it.

A brief look at Football, RU and cricket shows that only cricket had an increase in participation. Football and RU had some sort of decrease, although I'd imagine not on the same scale.

A new regulation from the Ministry of Sport requests all the youth to be in Olympic disciplines until 2012

I cannot see that ANYTHING the RFL have done has in ANY WAY made this situation happen.

These surveys are absolute rubbish.

Does anybody on here believe that between July and October last year, 1 in 7 peole stopped playing rugby league? In just 3 months?

Was that when they did the visa checks for aussies playing here? icon_razz.gif

No, but that's not the point.

It doesn't matter whether we believe them or not.

The point is will Sport England use them as the basis of their next funding package allocations to all of the various sports ? If so, then we can probably expect less money from them. They may not be true but they may form the basis of somebody's calculations of funding allocations somewhere. That is the inherent danger in the survey results.

Did a good job that Richard Lewis, converted us into a Minority of a Minority Sport, got us funding from Sport England and now regretting it by under valuing the sport further.

according to the survey more people play netball, hockey and participate in sailing than play league

I'm new to amateur RL and I've recently started training with a team in the Leeds area. It amazes me why some amateur RL is still being played in Winter! Why hasn't RL been coverted top to bottom? Surely playing and training in better weather would increase participation and possibly the overall skill of the youngsters coming through? We couldn't with train with ball in hand for 3 weeks during the bad weather/xmas and games are constantly being called off due to frosty pitches.

As I say, I'm new to amateur RL, and I'm not sure how it is set up/governed. It just seems daft to me.

Participation levels are down because the matches are always being called off due to the state of the pitches. Even if you want to play you bloody can't.

I've thought that for years mate.

It's a good point, but being a gentleman of larger carriage, I wouldn't relish the idea of playing on rock hard pitches in the summer.
Either quite a lot of games would have to be called off due to the pitches in summer too or there would be quite a lot of injuries.