In the book ‘Why England Lose’ by Simon Kuper & Stefan Syzmanski, they bring mathematics and economics, geography and statistics to prove various football facts; why England don’t win more cups and which countries strike above or below their expectations. When they come to the section concerning the percentage of the population that plays football, Barbados comes 8th in their world league, with 13% of the people playing regularly.
To back this up, there is a premier league followed by three further divisions in the men’s leagues with each containing at least twelve teams. The men’s master’s league is a two division 11 team league. The women’s league has another 7 teams.
That’s an astonishing 77 teams with around 25 players per club just in the main leagues. A number of these clubs also have under 18 teams, under 15 and so on down to under 11s. All this in a population of just 275,000 people.
FIFA lists the youth clubs as well so their figures are:
All Players 37,550
Registered players 15,840
Unregistered Players 21,710
Clubs 134
Officials 1,326
The older members of the population try to make out cricket is the top sport in the country. By memory, it is. The local newspapers feature cricket as the main sport. However, look anywhere there’s a field and you’ll see boys and girls playing football more than cricket, all year round. It’s obvious to the eye that more people follow football than cricket these days.
The book mentioned does state that many of the top percentage of population that plays football contains many islands. They suggest that’s because there’s ‘not much to do but play football and watch the waves roll in.’ This isn’t the case in Barbados. There’s so much to do yet so many still watch English premiership football, wear the shirts of those teams and play football whenever they can. They’ll talk for hours about their ‘English’ (and sometimes European to be fair) team. The times are a changing.
Football and cricket share pitches across the island. As soon as that stops, football will move forward even further.
There are positive plans to make the men’s premier division full time and professional with special funding from FIFA. Only time will tell if locals are positive enough to put their money to the test to watch local games.
