Poverty is when people haven’t got enough money to live their lives properly. It is the lack of basic resources needed to enjoy a full life. It affects participation in sports, because they just about have enough money to buy food and clothes and they do not have extra money to spend on leisure activities and things that they like to do. The main sports that need much money to participate in are football, basketball and boxing. They do not require expensive facilities. However this is not the case for sports that require expensive facilities such as: swimming, golf, polo and tennis.
I think very poor areas have produced world class athletes because people such as Diego Maradona grew up from a poor background and growing up he couldn’t afford much and was very poor and football was the only way out of a rubbish life. They don’t have many things to do so they would be doing it all day and because they couldn’t afford anything to practice with they would use a rag or something round. The fact that he used to do this all day long meant that he got really good at it. In Britain we now have a development fund that encourages poorer people to apply for funding in their local areas. Education is an important social influence on participation. School education encourages young people to take up active recreations and sports.
Education shapes our sporting views by making children want to take part in physical activities when they grow up because they took part in physical education in school. After school when you have passed 16, you might want to go onto college or university. Then you might go onto find a huge array of clubs and societies available that allow them to continue with those activities they already enjoy or perhaps even try some new ones.
The types of school you go to influences your sports choices and often standard because if you go to a school with loads of facilities such as Millfield school then you will be able to practice more and learn more sports making your standards higher and having a better chance of taking these skills and moving on with the sport when you get older. On the other hand if you go to a school with not so many facilities, this might lower your chances and affect your chances of getting a career in sport. The barriers for football are that, playing fields are being sold off to raise money for other local authority projects.
Gender is whether you are male or female. I don’t think it should affect your sporting choices. Whether you are male or female should not make any difference to your freedom to participate in whatever sport or activity you are interested in, should it? However, the long tradition of discrimination against women in sport has not completely died away, and gender does have a continuing influence on participation. Not too long ago girls and women could not participate in a whole bunch of activities. This was because men thought that if women took part in sport, they would hurt themselves, they would not be able to have children and would become aggressive and competitive.
Women can now play football and rugby and major athletic competition. There are some downsides to being a top class female athlete. Top class female athletes don’t get paid as much as men. Also many professional sports still have no organised women’s events and when they do, these events are not as widely publicised as the men’s events. Also, good looking professional women such as Denise Lewis don’t get as much attention on how good they are at the sport, but how good looking they are. I don’t think this is right because I think that women should have just as much of a right that me do, even though society may expect different things from women. At Wimbledon, men get paid more money than women do. I think this is unfair in some points but men have to play more and more people watch men than women because it is more exciting and exhilarating.
The forms of media are television, newspaper, radio, digital or cable TV, press, magazines and websites. Both the FA and sky TV control the premiership because without the FA there would be no football at all and they will discuss who are going to play who but if sky say that they want them to play at a different time then sky will win the argument to fit their TV schedules and without it sport wouldn’t be as popular as it is today.
Sports such as cricket gain more funding now due to media. This is because when England won the ashes it was all over the news and on front pages of newspapers. I think this is a good thing because it means that cricket teams can buy more facilities to practice. I also think it is a bad thing because while everyone is thinking about sports in the news and stuff they will not think about the bad things that are going on. I don’t think that media is all about money making, because they give people what they want to know and entertain them, they also advertise fundraising and charity events which is good for other people. However, they do make some things up just to make money.
Nowadays, people are living longer and having fewer children. For sports this means that older people are taking up more of the population so therefore there aren’t as many people participating in sports due to their age. This means that fewer people are doing sports such as football and rugby because of this sport will become less popular. There are some sports that only old people participate in such as croquette, bowls and golf. This is because they don’t have to move as a lot and they do not take a great deal of effort.
Whereas sports such as rugby take a lot of physical exertion and they may become exhausted and are more prone to hurting themselves. Older people can be encouraged to participate in sports more because there are many health benefits and it could be an opportunity for them to have fun or even catch up with some old friends and a way of associating.