Sport in England plays a prominent role in English society. Popular teams sports in England include association football, cricket, field hockey, rugby union, rugby league and netball. Major individual sports include badminton, athletics, tennis, boxing, golf, cycling, motorsport, and horseracing. Cricket is regarded as the national summer sport while football is the most popular sport, followed by cricket, tennis and rugby. A number of modern sports were codified in England during the nineteenth century, among them cricket, rugby union, rugby league, football, field hockey, bandy, squash, chess, tennis and badminton. The game of baseball was first described in 18th century England. England is the only country to have won the world cups in both football and cricket.
Structure England has its own national team in most team sports, but the United Kingdom sends a combined team to the Olympics. Competition between the home nations was traditionally at the centre of British sporting life, but it has become less important in recent decades. In particular, football's British Home Championship no longer takes place. In some sports there are still national English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish teams.
The Club Competitions in most team sports are also English affairs rather than British ones. There are various anomalies however, such as the participation of five Welsh football clubs in the English league system and an English club in the Scottish Football League.
The relative prominence of national team and club competition varies from sport to sport. In football, club competition is at the centre of the agenda most of the time because clubs plays more matches each year, but the four national teams are also followed avidly. In cricket the national team is much more widely followed than the county competitions, which have a limited profile, whereas in rugby league club competition generally overshadows international fixtures. Rugby union falls between these two with very high-profile international competitions and a strengthening club game.
Sport England is the governing body responsible for distributing funds and providing strategic guidance for sporting activity in England. There are five National Sports Centres: Bisham Abbey, Crystal Palace, Holme Pierrepont National Watersports Centre, Lilleshall and Plas Y Brenin National Mountain Centre in Wales. Everyday Sport is Sport England's physical activity campaign. There are 49 County Sport Partnerships in England with areas for responsibility separated according to local authority boundaries. Many leisure centres, sports centres, or recreation centres are operated by local authorities or contracted out by them to an independent operator.
The English Institute of Sport is a nationwide network of support services, aimed at improving the standard of English athletes. Services include sports medicine, physiotherapy, sports massage, applied physiology, strength and conditioning, nutrition, psychology and Performance Lifestyle support. It is based at 8 regional hubs and other satellite centers.
The Minister for Sport and Tourism and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have responsibility for sport in England.
The role of sport in the formation of an English identity England, like the other nations of the United Kingdom, competes as a separate nation in some international sporting events, notably in certain team sports which originated from England. The English football, cricket (the England Cricket team represents England and Wales)England Cricket Team Profile ICC World Cup 2007 website. Retrieved 13 September 2006. and rugby union teams have contributed to a growing sense of English identity. 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.Daily Mirror newspaper (UK) , article by Billy Bragg, 17 September 2005 – Accessed November 2006. "Watching the crowd in Trafalgar Square celebrating the Ashes win, I couldn't help but be amazed at how quickly the flag of St George has replaced the Union Flag in the affections of England fans. A generation ago, England games looked a lot like Last Night of the Proms, with the red, white and blue firmly to the fore. Now, it seems, the English have begun to remember who they are."
Elite level team sports There are four sports in England which operate high-profile professional leagues. Association football is by far the most popular sport and is played from August to May. Rugby union is also a winter sport. Cricket is played in the Summer, from April to September. 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.
Football
The most popular sport in the UK, football was first codified in 1863 in London. It is known in the US and a few other countries as 'soccer.' The impetus for this was to unify English public school and university football games. There is evidence for refereed, team football games being played in English schools since at least 1581. An account of an exclusively kicking football game from Nottinghamshire in the fifteenth century bears striking similarity to football. The playing of football in England is documented since at least 1314. England is home to the oldest football clubs in the world (dating from at least 1857), the world's oldest competition (the FA Cup founded in 1871) and the first ever football league (1888). The modern passing game of football was developed in London in the early 1870s For these reasons England is considered the cradle of the game of football.
The governing body for football in England is The Football Association which is the oldest football organisation in the world. It is responsible for national teams, the recreational game and the main cup competitions. They have however lost a significant amount of power to the professional leagues in recent times.
English football has a league system which incorporates thousands of clubs, and is topped by four fully professional divisions. The elite Premier League has 20 teams and is the richest football league in the world. The other three fully professional divisions are the run by the English Football League, the oldest league in the world, and include another 72 clubs. Annual promotion and relegation operates between these four divisions and also between the lowest of them and lower level or "non-League" football. There are a small number of fully professional clubs outside the top four divisions, and many more semi-professional clubs. Thus England has over a hundred fully professional clubs in total, which is considerably more than any other country in Europe.
The two main cup competitions in England are the FA Cup, which is open to clubs down to Level 10 of the English football pyramid structure; and the League Cup (currently known as the Carabao Cup), which is for the 92 professional clubs in the four main professional divisions only.
Each season the most successful clubs from each of the home nations qualify for the three Europe-wide club competitions organised by UEFA: the UEFA Champions League (formerly the European Cup), the UEFA Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup) and the UEFA Conference League. England has produced winners in each of these competitions.
The England national football team won the World Cup in 1966 when it was hosted in England. however, they took 55 years to reach a final of a major international tournament being Euro 2020, though they reached the semi-finals of the World Cup in 1990 and 2018, and the quarter-finals in 1986, 2002 and 2006. England reached the semi-finals of the UEFA European Championship when they hosted it in 1996, and finished third in Euro 1968; they also made the quarter-finals of Euro 2004 and 2012. In the UEFA Nations League, launched in 2018–19, they were assigned to the top level of that competition, League A, and advanced to the semi-finals in that season.
The FA hopes that the completion of the National Football Centre will go some way to improving the national team's performance.
Cricket
Cricket is another popular team sport, regarded as one of the national sports of England and the second most popular and followed sport in the country.
Although there is some debate about the origins of the game, modern cricket is generally believed to have originated in England with the laws of cricket – adhered to by players at all levels worldwide – established by the London-based Marylebone Cricket Club. Although the origins of cricket in England date back as far as the sixteenth century, formal laws of the game began to be developed in the eighteenth century. Most recently, the globally popular Twenty20 format of cricket was innovated in England at the turn of the 21st century.
The England national cricket team is one of the twelve Full Members of the International Cricket Council, enabling England to participate in Test, One Day Internationals and Twenty20 International matches, as well as the ICC Cricket World Cup. Cricket in England is administered by the England and Wales Cricket Board, having been overseen by the Test and County Cricket Board until 1997. It is one of only 2 countries in Europe to be full ICC members, along with the Ireland cricket team.
England's professional domestic system consists of eighteen teams from the historic counties of England and Wales, playing a variety of matches over the summer cricket season. 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. Twenty more clubs compete in the amateur Minor Counties Cricket Championship. 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.
Cricket is a popular recreational and summer sport in England, with hundreds of clubs playing at various levels; village cricket in particular is regarded as a key aspect of English culture. 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. It is also a popular school and university sport in the summer.
Lord's Cricket Ground, located in the St. John's Wood area of London, is known as "the home of cricket" and in addition to housing the Marylebone Cricket Club, is also the headquarters of the European Cricket Council and was until 2005 the headquarters of the International Cricket Council. England has hosted five ICC Men's Cricket World Cups to date, in 1975, 1979, 1983, 1999 and 2019. In addition to these tournaments, England has also hosted the ICC Men's T20 World Cup in 2009 and the ICC Men's Champions Trophy in 2004 and 2013.
England have won one ICC Cricket World Cup, in 2019. They previously finished as runners up in the 1979, 1987 and 1992 tournaments. In addition, England have won the ICC Men's T20 World Cup twice in 2010 and 2022.
England enjoys a storied rivalry with Australia, against whom they compete for The Ashes in a contest that dates back to the nineteenth century. The English cricket team also enjoys rivalries against India and the West Indies, although the latter is no longer as fierce as it was during its peak in the 1980s.