Social stratification and sports’ participation in England

Using a latent class analysis, we identify distinct typologies of sports’ consumers in England and then determine whether the socio-economic makeup of the latent classes resemble recent scholarly work across different cultural and leisure fields. The third part of the analysis provides a nuanced rigorous statistical evaluation of the subtle socio-economic differences between the active sports’ clusters. Our analysis is unique with few studies, if any, identifying and then examining types of sports consumers in this way. The findings largely corroborate research in other cultural and leisure fields, although there are distinctive types of consumers’ specific to sport along gender lines, and a group which consumes highbrow sports but when compared to other types of sports’ consumers, do not exclusively come from the higher social strata.