RFU underestimates strength of women's and girls' rugby

The annual rummage into the mysteries of the RFU's player registration system has revealed the usual oddities - some of you have mysteriously disappeared from the club's register of players, some of you are there twice, and some of you are listed as boys. In addition some long departed names are still there. So a fun time can be looked forward to putting these right.

The system - RugbyFirst - is important for various reason, not least that it is the source of all the RFU's player data. It is where the RFU compiled the information for the IRB that said that there are some 275,000 teenage and adult players in England, of whom about 10,000 (or about 3.5%) are women or girls. But given the "accuracy" of the Letchworth registration, how much can we rely on this? Is there an independent survey of player numbers in rugby (or come to that other sports?).

In fact there is.  Sport England's Active People Survey asks a cross section of the population which sports - if any - they take part in for at least 30 minutes each week (during the season) - and it makes interesting reading as, while it shows that the RFU estimate for the number of rugby players in England is probably about right, it wildly underestimates how many of them are women. 

The RFU claim that there are 9,974 girls and women aged over 13 playing rugby - but Sport England found 17,300 female players aged over 16 (so the number aged 13 or more could be over 20,000)! That is over 7.5% of all English rugby players (one in thirteen), or more than twice the RFU's estimate. Why this should be is difficult to say, but the only explanation that makes sense is that for some reason the RugbyFirst database is somehow failing to pick up more than half of the country's female players.

What is even more remarkable is that - despite a decade of work by the FA and the ECB successfully making the image of their sports more "girl friendly"- rugby is actually a more "female" sport than, for example, football (only 6.7% of soccer players are women) - and is now only just behind cricket (8.4%). Which again raises the question about why women's rugby fares so badly in the press even compared with other women's sports...