Rugby has emerged as the favourite sport of Irish women following a year of “memorable moments” and “standout achievements” across the Six Nations and the Rugby World Cup. –
Ireland went into the sport’s global showpiece event in September as favourites and the world’s top-ranked nation. They ultimately came up short, losing to New Zealand in the quarter-finals, but a familiar season’s end was preceded by a Grand Slam Six Nations win, an unbeaten record running to 17 games, and a win over back-to-back World Cup champions South Africa in Paris.
This, no doubt, forms a large part of rugby’s wider appeal, although the findings of the 2023 Teneo Sport and Sponsorship Index (TSSI) captures the full extent of the growth in popularity among women in particular. This is also a reflection of the general public’s access to and enjoyment around watching and attending matches, the successful promotion of the sport particularly in 2023, and accessibility to different forms of the game.
The quarter-final defeat to the All Blacks provided Virgin Media Television with the highest viewership figure of its 25-year history, an average of 1.378 million people tuned in, with a reported 60,000 Irish fans in the French capital for the final pool games.
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Recently retired Irish outhalf Johnny Sexton was joined in tied second by Connacht centre Bundee Aki behind Katie Taylor as Ireland’s most admired athlete 2023 in the TSSI survey, which is a comprehensive 1,000 person nationally representative survey with quotas imposed across gender, region, age and social class.
Rather than surveying sports fans exclusively, it examines the Irish general public’s attitudes towards sport and their sporting heroes. And for Irish women aged between 18 and 24, Sexton is their second most admired Irish athlete on 11 per cent. Second to Taylor, whose defeat of Chantelle Cameron was tied with the Grand Slam triumph as the Irish public’s greatest sporting achievement of 2023.
In contrast, for 18 to 24-year-old men, Bundee Aki was the choice of less than one per cent, and just four per cent picked Sexton. For this age and gender split, Irish soccer international Evan Ferguson commands 13 per cent of the vote despite barely appearing across much of the rest of the voting.
An impressive 43 per cent of Irish people say they are interested in or like rugby, but it is the sport in Ireland which most women are interested in, at 38 per cent.
And taking that a step further, rugby is the favourite individual sport of women in Ireland with 13 per cent selecting it. Camogie/Hurling is the next favourite sport of Irish women, followed by soccer and then Gaelic football. The favourite sport for men is comfortably soccer at 29 per cent.
Digging deeper into the popularity of rugby among women and we can see the age demographic who most selected it as their favourite sport is over 55s, followed by 45- to 54-year-old women. Dublin is the area where rugby scores highest among women.
Looking at participation figures, the age demographic where rugby is played most is among 18 to 24-year-old women, at 7 per cent. Just 2 per cent of Irish people play or participate in rugby overall.
Asked for the reasons why they participate in sport, 81 per cent of women said they played to be healthy, 64 per cent wanted to improve their mental health, and just 12 per cent do it for the love of the sport. Nearly half of men who participate in sport say they do it for the love of that sport.
The survey’s references to participation and membership includes all forms of rugby, including tag rugby, which is constantly growing in popularity with the Irish Tag Rugby Association saying they had over 10,000 adults playing in their leagues in 2023.
Fourteen per cent of Irish women are members of a sports club – in comparison to 32 per cent of men – and 26 per cent are members of a gym or health and fitness club. GAA/LGFA and Camogie clubs have the most amount of members who are women, followed by soccer, and then athletics and rugby.
