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    Declining sports

    Back in the mid '90s, I learned to play rink bandy (quick precis: basic ice hockey set up, but no checking, no offside, shorter sticks and ball instead of puck). This was an enormously popular game over here at the time, teams and leagues were seemingly everywhere, to the point where practically every company of reasonable size had at least one team. The Nokia tournament in 1996 (we were a large but not a huge company at the time) was played between 16 teams, that'll be something like 200+ players. Every large town would run several amateur leagues, featuring teams from various works, clubs, or just groups of friends. On top of everything was the more serious business of the national league.

    Step forward to the present day and you'll be hard pressed to find much going on at all. The national league has been defunct for a few seasons now, and I forget the last time I saw anyone just knocking a ball around, let alone an actual game going on. Hopefully, this is just a bad patch that this particular sport is going through, and the number of participants will increase in the years to come. I certainly had a whale of a time playing it.

    Any other examples of sports no longer in their heyday?

    #2
    Coursing. Royal Tennis. Fives. Maybe even Raquetball?

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      #3
      "Straight" or 14.1 pool doesn't seem to get much TV time anymore compared to 9 ball.

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        #4
        I think we've done this before - I remember writing about British (or Welsh) baseball which used to be a fairly popular sport in Liverpool and South Wales. The annual England v Wales match would draw crowds of several thousand and there were strong local leagues in each year, which often included participation from footballers and rugby players wanting to keep fit through the summer. I don't think the league has run in Liverpool for a four or five years due to lack of players. The international in 2015 was cancelled as England couldn't raise a side, and I don't think it has been revived since. Looking online throws up a load of dead links. The Twitter feed for the Welsh Baseball Union hasn't been updated since 2017, with one of the final tweets being to say that the league has been abandoned due to clubs folding. It's followed by the hashtag #onlytemporary but I think the sport may be effectively dead.

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          #5
          Jai Alai
          Beach Volleyball
          In-Line/Roller hockey
          Ringette

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            #6
            I admit to being in a bit of a beach-volleyball-mecca bubble, but I see no sign of a decline in Beach Volleyball here.

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              #7
              See also Jai Alai in the Basque Country.

              Reed is primarily focusing on failed attempts to commercialise the sports outside of their heartlands.

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                #8
                How about speedway?

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                  #9
                  Speedway has declined due to the stadiums being built on. The same is true for banger racing and greyhound racing. You can make maybe £80,000 a year profit running a greyhound stadium or sell it for £5m for housing. Guess what happens?

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by Paul S View Post
                    Speedway has declined due to the stadiums being built on. The same is true for banger racing and greyhound racing. You can make maybe £80,000 a year profit running a greyhound stadium or sell it for £5m for housing. Guess what happens?
                    Indeed. I grew up near a dog track (Dunmore Park)and now live up the road from Cradley Heath's old speedway track.

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                      #11
                      As I say regularly on the Rugby League threads, for as long as I've followed it RL can be seen at any point in time to be either expanding or contracting. It's played in more countries than ever before, the top players get paid far more than they did before, but it's always in a perilous state financially and overly dependent on TV deals and benefactors - though that applies to many other sports of course. In this country below Super League it is really hand to mouth stuff.

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                        #12
                        Rugby Union in Australia. Everyone cared about the Wallabies twenty years ago when we arrived here, the captain was a national hero. I would be surprised if half the,population could even name him now. I can't.

                        Nobody I know follows a Super Rugby team and the crowds are feeble.

                        See also Australian basketball.

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by Paul S View Post
                          Speedway has declined due to the stadiums being built on. The same is true for banger racing and greyhound racing. You can make maybe £80,000 a year profit running a greyhound stadium or sell it for £5m for housing. Guess what happens?
                          That's surely an argument that's always been true though, yet it didn't prevent Speedway expanding previously. Plenty of teams have folded or re-located throughout the history of the sport, none of which prevented Speedway thriving both in terms of participants and spectators, Something went wrong with Speedway itself, crowds dwindle, teams fold, stadia get sold, cycle repeats. Don't know what went wrong, but the crap exclusive rights TV deal the BSPA negotiated with ITV (1976?) certainly didn't help, effectively killing Speedway as a TV sport.

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                            #14
                            Speedway - I'd argue (probably incorrectly but there we go) that not having a single World Final, as it used to be, hasn't helped at all in terms of profile.

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by Sits View Post
                              Rugby Union in Australia. Everyone cared about the Wallabies twenty years ago when we arrived here, the captain was a national hero. I would be surprised if half the,population could even name him now. I can't.

                              Nobody I know follows a Super Rugby team and the crowds are feeble.

                              See also Australian basketball.
                              I have seen it argued that the boost in popularity in rugby union 20 years ago was in large part a fortuitous mix of the Wallabies winning the World Cup + the Super League war turning many people off rugby league for years and years to come. Plus international rugby league was a sad joke then, I think the Kangaroos went a whole calendar year without playing a Test and the 2001 RLWC was a disaster.

                              So it could be argued that rugby union was just returning back to its previous level, although the ARU has been mismanaged for a good 15 years now and completely squandering the legacy of the 2003 World Cup seems like an enormous missed opportunity.

                              Basketball's a funny one because I suspect the national team is the best it's ever been, with at least ten or eleven Aussies in the NBA.

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                Jai Alai
                                Beach Volleyball
                                In-Line/Roller hockey
                                Ringette
                                How did you miss bowling? That's a huge one.

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                                  #17
                                  Squash is declining in pure participation terms. To give an example, the club in the town where I grew up used to have 20+ Divisions in in's internal league, and put out 5 Men's and 4 Women's teams each week. Christ knows how people fitted everything in on just two (shonky) courts - they must have been in absolutely constant use. The decline at this club was more than just the decline of the sport, it was also a lack of interest in Squash from those running the club, but all the internal leagues were gone 15 years ago, the teams left between 5-10 years ago and the last remaining court shut ~3 years back. There is no Squash at all there any more.

                                  That is an extreme example, and was a combination of factors including land ownership, etc. But the decline of interest in the Sport was certainly part of it. It has been mimicked in Cambrideshire as a whole. The number of clubs in Cambridge itself, for example, has just about halved within the last decade. Including the lose of the marquee club, Cambridge Squash Club. That was not a club that was struggling, but again land ownership - they didn't own the land their courts were on, and the people who did succeeded in sneaking an application through to get them turned into housing. 'Cambridge Squash Club' lives on as a name, sharing with the University Sports Club, but it's really not that same. The old club was a club, it had a bar and social area, kitchen facilities, etc. It often hosted tournaments such as the County Closed.

                                  That was a loss that hurt, particularly as it came within a year of a similar well set-up club out in the sticks, Abbotsley, going for similar ownership reasons. In that case it was five Squash Courts that had been built on to the clubhouse of a golf club, making use of the bar already there and so on. It must have made economic sense at the time, but it seems it had stopped doing so, and despite converting two of the courts into gyms, the owners pulled the plug. Again there was a substantial rump membership there which got turfed out at that point.

                                  Over the 20-odd years I've been playing, it's probably the case that half the clubs have shut and others have substantially cut back the number of teams they put into county leagues. To give a couple of examples, the Herts Women's League appears to have gone defunct this season after running with 4 or 5 teams (4-woman rather than the usual 5-woman) for the last few seasons, and the Cambs Women's League is down to 7 sides in Division 1 and just 4 in Division 2 (and these are 3-woman).


                                  However, the odd thing about it all is that the pro game has probably never been stronger. The disconnect between the grassroots and the international scene is huge.

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                                    #18
                                    Bowling is an excellent call from a US perspective.

                                    What was once a staple of weekend television and high school sports has fallen off a cliff at all levels.

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                                      #19
                                      Non-major sports struggle to achieve institutional status once a sports system has formed (I'm using the terms as used in the Andrew Markowits book Offside a historical study on why soccer hasn't developed in the US, written in the early MLS years.

                                      Once a sports system has colonised a country, it develops institutional heft and social underpinings. That can see it through a lot of troubles that would kill other sports stone dead.

                                      There's clearly a series of interlocking elements - having a decent governing body is crucial who can provide seed corn funding and take the long view whilst balancing the pressures between the game as a game, and the sport as a business. That's the biggest factor it seems to me - governing bodies pursue exposure on TV at all costs, and make deals with commercial entities which effectively say to the people who've tended the sport in its nascent years that they simple arent' enough, and that their interests and the wider interests of the sport are somehow antithetical. Having facilities that are under the long-term control of the sport is critical; having some money from a part of the world in which the sport does well can be helpful too, if that sport has an expansionist strategy. Having stand out star quality helps big time in getting media coverage, but you also need grassroots facilities for people to play the game as well as watch it. It's that failure to have a compelling spectator sport offering alongside a grassroots participative side that I think marks out the difference between a 'big' sport and, well, something else.

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                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                        See also Jai Alai in the Basque Country.

                                        Reed is primarily focusing on failed attempts to commercialise the sports outside of their heartlands.
                                        I am still convinced that there is a great film to be made about Jai Alai in Connecticut. The article that you linked to the last time that the subject came up was wonderful.

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                                          #21
                                          Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                          Bowling is an excellent call from a US perspective.

                                          What was once a staple of weekend television and high school sports has fallen off a cliff at all levels.
                                          I thought Flynnie meant Bowls and that it was a good call - though I suppose it is still part of the Commonwealth Games.

                                          The mention of high school bowling has reminded me that I saw some televised College Cornhole on holiday and was absolutely flabbergasted by its existence.

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                                            #22
                                            I don't even want to know

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                                              #23
                                              There is a "30 for 30" short on Jai Alai in the US, but it only 15 minutes long, and I agree a longer treatment is merited.

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                                                #24
                                                I was equally surprised by seeing college cornhole on a TV screen in a bar fairly recently. Ole Miss against the Razorbacks, I think, which would make sense. I wonder if anyone gets a cornhole scholarship to university these days?

                                                Two weeks ago I saw some televised pro axe throwing - I've no idea if it was collegiate, but its very existence on TV, as some kind of sub-par redneck darts/archery, is baffling.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Televised college Beer Pong is the logical next step?

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