Over 70m tickets sold to UK sport events in 2015 thanks to Rugby World Cup boost
More than 70m tickets to sports events in the UK were sold in 2015, representing a five per cent increase on last year, according to research from Deloitte's Sports Business Group.
Only in 2012, when 75m tickets were sold as London hosted the Olympic Games, has the UK recorded higher sports attendances in a calendar year.
The Rugby World Cup, which was hosted in the UK for the first time since 1999 and enjoyed record crowds with 2.5m tickets sold, helped boost the overall sporting attendance to 70.5m
Yet football still dominated the UK's sporting landscape with an overall attendance of 43.4m – 61 per cent of all tickets sold.
Read more: Rugby World Cup enjoys record crowds
With aggregate attendances of 13.7m and 10m respectively, the Premier League and Championship enjoyed the first and third largest crowds in Europe according to Deloitte.
And the interest is beginning to stretch to women's football: the Women's Super League enjoying a 48 per cent increase in attendances in part thanks to the positive impact of England's successful Women's World Cup campaign.
Wimbledon was the highest-attended annual sporting event with an aggregate attendance of 484,000 across the 13 day tennis tournament.
Dan Jones, a partner in Deloitte's Sports Business Group, commented:
The UK public have again demonstrated their great passion for attending live sport. England 2015 was the biggest Rugby World Cup ever, with the 2.5m tickets sold breaking the attendance record. This helped drive a five per cent growth in spectator numbers across all professional sports events in 2015 – to more than 70m – as sport continues to grip the nation.