England is a nation that seems to have a love/hate relationship with sport. On the one hand, we are obsessed. We watch sports diligently and talk enthusiastically about results and fixtures. On the other hand, a recent YouGov survey shows that most of the nation actually find watching sports quite boring.
The recent YouGov poll of 1600 British adults asked people to rate 17 sports on whether they find them boring, exciting, or neither. Surprisingly, out of the 17 sports chosen for the survey, Brits found the majority of them, 12 in total, more boring than exciting.
According to the poll, golf takes the top spot for being the most boring sport in the country, with 70% of respondents overall reporting that it is boring and 52% saying it was ‘very boring’. Golf is by far the most boring, with an 11% lead over second-place American Football, which scored 59% on the boring chart.
Our beloved cricket, considered in the UK to be a much-loved national sport, came in third place, with 58% reporting that they find cricket boring to watch. That’s quite surprising given that cricket was once the country’s second most popular sport, right behind football.
Nowadays there are still around 278,600 people who play the game every week, but viewing figures have been falling. Last year, viewing figures for the Ashes were averaging under 100,000 per day, not including online and digital viewings. Peak audiences reached 340,000, but this was still less than half of the peak at the 2011 Ashes.
Has Britain fallen out of love with cricket? Perhaps the younger generation doesn’t have the same level of interest, or maybe the traditional village green cricket scenes are dying out. The poll is revealing, but it should not be taken as completely accurate. A small sample size of 1600 people only represents a segment of the general public, not the opinions of cricket fans and audiences.
Behind cricket in the poll of Britain’s most boring sports to watch is darts, with 58% of respondents saying that they find it boring. Snooker was next, with 57% finding it boring to watch, despite events like the Snooker World Championship that provide world-class-tournament-style viewing. Ronnie O’Sullivan and Mark Selby are currently joint favourites to win.
The YouGov poll revealed that the sports Brits consider the most exciting to watch is actually athletics, with 47% saying that they are excited by it. However, it’s worth considering that athletics events are rarely shown, and when the public watches them, they think of the Olympics. If athletics were on every day or week, then we could see different results.
Football and tennis were joint second-place finishes, with 43% of respondents finding them exciting. Football was the most polarised sport, with around 20% of people finding it ‘very exciting’, but with 40% also describing it as ‘boring’. The majority of people also found gymnastics and rugby union to be more exciting than they are boring, and there was a north-south divide on whether rugby union or rugby league were more exciting, with the north opting for the league.
The YouGov poll gives an interesting cross-section of the thoughts of the British people. It perhaps demonstrates the culture of instant-gratification that has arisen of late, with the faster sports being described as exciting and the slow builders (like cricket) being described as boring. Whatever the case, we know not to take it too seriously—cricket is the most exciting sport in the world!
