Football continues to dominate regional sports coverage with women's football nearly invisible, study finds

Dr Richard Jones, Director of Journalism at the University of Salford, analysed the output of Saturday sports specials papers from Aberdeen, Belfast, Birmingham and Hull from four Saturdays in 1975 and 1995, and then the online and X (Twitter) output of their successor websites on the equivalent Saturdays in 2025.

He found that:

• Overall, the titles published 349 total stories across the chosen days, down from 1948 in 1995 and 1513 back in 1975.
• Of these stories, football accounted for 65% of those stories in 2025, an increase of 20% on the number of stories published in 1995.
• Despite women’s football being second only to men’s football as a television sport in the UK, women’s sport made up just 2.3% of the coverage on the chosen Saturday’s. That shows almost no change from the 2.2% figure in 1975 and is down on the 3% of stories recorded in 1995.
• Despite the decline in volume of overall sports content, readers are getting greater depth in the stories which are being covered. Aided by live blogs, three-quarters of modern website pieces (74.8%) are more than 12 paragraphs long, compared to 23.2% in 1975 and 34.1% in 1995.
• In a separate analysis of the news bulletins on talkSPORT and BBC Radio 5 Live across 2025, he found that football also dominated the radio waves, accounting for 55.3% on the public service broadcaster and 67% on its rival radio sport station.
• The gender split between men’s and women’s sport on the two broadcast platforms was also pronounced, with men’s sport earning 77.5% of bulletins on 5 Live and 93.1% on talkSPORT. Men’s football also led 75% of bulletins on the latter whilst the former showcased a broader coverage of sports, as men’s football only led less than a third of bulletins on 5 Live.

Of the four cities monitored for regional coverage, Richard found that the Belfast Telegraph did the best job of upholding both breadth and depth of sports coverage on Saturdays. Of the 349 website articles in 2025, the outlet did 205 and provided the only surviving local coverage of sports such as golf, motorcycling and hockey.

But football reigned supreme across the others, with 16 of the 17 stories in the Aberdeen Press and Journal and 59 of 64 on Birmingham Live dedicated to top tier men’s professional football. Hull Live’s approach was the outlier as it reflected the strength of the city’s two rugby league clubs Hull FC and Hull KR, with 42 out of 63 articles posted covering the sport.

There was also little innovation in X (Twitter) output, with just 10 of the 469 posts across the titles featuring embedded videos: 450 simply included a short headline and a link to draw readers to the websites.

Coverage of amateur and school sport, once a staple of the regional press, has largely disappeared.

Richard said: “Sport is one of the things readers still turn to the regional press for but dwindling resources in the sector and the popularity of football around the world means most titles are focusing on more in-depth coverage of their biggest local clubs at the expense of almost everything else.

“These findings underline how significant football always was to the agenda of our sporting press and how top-level men’s football, is now often the only game in town.

“Women’s sport, especially football, has become a much bigger part of our culture, yet surprisingly this has not yet been reflected in the regional press, as it focuses on the smaller range of events which attract most readers and subscribers online.”

The findings are included in Richard’s new book, Sports Journalism in the UK, published by Routledge today (Wednesday 14 October).

The book examines the changes taking place across sports journalism, and includes chapters on visual, audio and written media, as well as case studies of coverage of football, cricket, rugby league, boxing and swimming.