There’s no doubt about it, the Australians take their sport more seriously than the British - particularly when it comes to taking part. That’s probably why they do so well in sporting competitions.

The biggest spectator sport here is Australian Rules Football. I wasn’t sure whether it was a bigger sport here than football is in the UK, so I dug out the numbers from the official websites, for example The AFL. (To avoid confusion, the Aussies always refer to football as soccer.)

Then I divided the total attendances at games in a year by the total population of the country. Here’s what I got for the 2004-2005 season:

Australian Football League (AFL) = 0.32 attendances per head of population

(6.3 million attendances / 20 million population of Australia)

English League Football = 0.43 attendances per head of population

(23 million attendances / 53 million population of England and Wales)

Scottish League Football = 0.80 attendances per head of population

(4.0 million attendances / 5.0 million population of Scotland)

So it turns out that Aussie rules football isn’t as popular in Australia as football is in the UK.

It’s also interesting to see that watching football in Scotland is about twice as popular as in England.