Sport in Society

Task Five

The sports industry is very important in today’s society, not only does it provide leisure activities, but it is also one of the largest providers of jobs, from athletes to managers to physiotherapists. In this task one is going to explain the current scale and economic importance of the sports industry, referring to rugby and football, two quite different, popular sports.

Employment

In sport, there are a lot of different types of jobs available; not only team members, the jobs range from managers to sports retailers. One estimate of the total workforce was made by Sportdata and they propose, “Employment in sport was 437,460 in 1998, compared to 425,056 in 1995.” Since then, the number of people employed in the sports industry has greatly increased, and is still growing. The number of people involved in the sports and fitness industry, is expected to increase to 347,000 by 2008, which will be a 36% increase over just 10 years, however these figures do not take into consideration those that help out voluntarily.

Football is the one of the most popular sports worldwide; there are nearly 50,000 clubs with 3 million participants. It’s not only those who are closely connected to sport that get money out of it, sports retail sectors make a lot of money making the kits for the players.

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There are 430 rugby league clubs with 42,000 players altogether and the numbers are increasing. There are many different types of jobs in rugby, from managing to secretarial work.

Participation

There are many different ways we can participate in a form of exercise or sports. There are those involved in sports clubs, health and fitness activities, outdoor activities, casual sport with friends or even a social swim. We cannot find an exact figure as to how many people do participate regularly in sport but we can get a close estimate, roughly 82% of people aged 15 or over ...

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