Is New Zealand really obsessed with rugby?

It is supposedly a fact that New Zealand is obsessed with rugby. We see it written and talked about as an undisputed fact, on any and every rugby forum.

In a week when the All Blacks have lost, and the New Zealand reaction has been quite muted and accepting, it seems a good time to check whether New Zealand is quite as obsessed as is usually thought.

An English Sky Sports presenter, James Gemmell, has recently made a documentary looking at two famous rugby playing schools in Auckland and determined that their apparent obsession with rugby is a microcosm of the national obsession.

But is New Zealand really that obsessed with rugby? Is rugby the New Zealand national religion that many people think it is?

While it may have been pre-eminent in the past, today, much of New Zealand society consider rugby to be: “blah blah”, “couldn’t really care”, “All Blacks – whatever”. Many other people are actively anti-rugby, seeing it as a male-dominated, violent blight on society.

While much of my evidence is anecdotal, the statistics also seem to back up my assertion that New Zealand is not particularly obsessed with rugby.

The total number of registered New Zealand rugby players in 2016 was 155,934; about three per cent of the population. Of this number, 85,341 were children and 42,275 were teenagers, mostly at school. Adult players, both men and women, only totalled 28,318.

According to these stats, five out of six people who played at school do not carry on playing rugby once they leave. It appears that New Zealand schools may be obsessed with rugby, but this obsession does not seem to continue after school. Gemmell’s documentary, based mainly on schools, is therefore not likely to be representative of New Zealand society as a whole.

In an obsessed society, one would expect that more than 0.6 per cent of the adult population would be playing the game. But in 2014, Sport NZ‘s survey found rugby to be the 16th most popular sport or recreation activity in New Zealand.

I am certainly not obsessed with the 16th most popular thing in my life, so on this figure alone, it would appear that New Zealand is not particularly obsessed by rugby.

Spectator numbers are usually another indicator of obsession. Countries obsessed with football, such as Brazil, Argentina or virtually any European nation, pack their club stadiums with tens of thousands of chanting, screaming fans on a weekly basis. But in New Zealand at the provincial rugby games, the spectators are regularly numbered in the hundreds rather than thousands. Many rugby clubs are pleased if the spectators get into the dozens.

In Super Rugby, the figures are little better. Most of the New Zealand franchises, in spite of their high standard and regular success, attract crowds averaging somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.

This is very different to the figures from the past, such as in 1956 when Hamilton had a population of less than 40,000, but 55,000 people crammed into Hamilton’s Rugby Park to watch Waikato beat the Springboks. It would have been inconceivable in 1956 that rugby would ever fall to the 16th most popular pastime in New Zealand.

But if New Zealanders aren’t showing their obsession by attending rugby games, then maybe they’re still watching at home? Rugby in New Zealand can mostly only be watched on Sky and Sky New Zealand has around 700,000 subscribers in total. Even if all these people have the package for the rugby, that is still only about 15 per cent of the population who can watch top-level rugby regularly.

Add together the people attending the games and the subscribers watching at home, and the best possible scenario is that less than 20 per cent of New Zealanders are watching rugby regularly.

This 20 per cent actually outweighs my own experience of the interest in rugby. While many of my friends and relatives have some vague interest in the game, I only know about five people who are obsessed by rugby to anything close to my level, and one of them is English. Since the wonders of Facebook allow me to count my friends and acquaintances, that’s five out of 572, less than one per cent.

In my extended family, I have an uncle and a cousin who played the game pretty well, a brother-in-law who attends games occasionally, and a couple of distant cousins who are interested in the All Blacks. But my mother would not be able to name a single All Black, my father attended a rugby game once – but only because he was in the choir singing the anthem, and barely anyone else in the entire extended family would know the difference between rugby and rugby league.

At work in the New Zealand Army, there was pretty good interest when the All Blacks were playing and a few of us would run sweepstakes and watch avidly, but more than half of my colleagues were not the slightest bit interested.

When I lived in officers messes, I would leave the crowded bar on Friday nights to watch the Super Rugby game in the TV room, but would generally be there on my own, or maybe with one or two other people, while 30 or 40 people caroused in the next room.

It was not until I moved to Australia and lived in country Victoria that I discovered what sport as religion actually looked like. I saw little old ladies queuing the night before to get tickets to AFL quarter-finals. I attended normal AFL season games in the rain with 70,000 plus people. I saw my completely unsporting Australian sister-in-law sit down on Friday nights to watch the ‘footy’, the only reason they actually had a TV.

During grand final week, I was asked by a little girl on the street “…who are you going for?”, because I was the only person around not wearing the colours of one team or the other. I watched local TV news on grand final day hoping that just one story might be about something other than the grand final – in vain.

I seemed to be the only person in Victoria who was not totally obsessed with the game. It went beyond sport into tribalism, and a complete and total identification with your team, and pervaded all sectors of society, which I had never seen in New Zealand. I realised that New Zealanders actually have no idea how to properly worship their sport.

So in spite of the stereotype: playing numbers, spectator interest, popularity and the general vibe, all indicate that New Zealand is far from being obsessed by rugby. It is time for people to look elsewhere for the reasons why the All Blacks are so good.

Modern society (even in New Zealand) has many more things around for people to obsess over, and it appears that the New Zealand obsession with rugby has faded into a mild interest. New Zealanders are certainly proud of the All Blacks, but they are no longer the central focus of New Zealand society.

New Zealand’s obsession with rugby is a fading myth.