Every MMORPG has to have it, for reasons that I find hard to imagine. Is it such a universal pastime? I know it used to be ranked the #1 participatory "sport" in the United Kingdom, when I was growing up in the 'seventies, but people had fewer ways to entertain themselves in those deprived and forsaken times.
You know what? Let's fact-check that. Was it ever that popular? Is it still? It always seemed unlikely to me but I didn't have the worldwide web and an AI assistant to help me check back then.
Here's what Gemini says:
"No, fishing is no longer the most popular participation sport in the UK. While it is still widely practiced with millions of participants, mainstream activities like football and swimming have surpassed it. Football boasts roughly 11 million players, and swimming attracts over 4 million participants, placing them well ahead of angling."
And as for the supposed domination it used to enjoy:
Where the Myth Comes From
Past Status: Angling was widely cited as the number one participant sport in Britain for many decades through the late 20th century.
Industry Claims: Governing bodies like the Angling Trust still refer to it as "one of the nation's largest" or "biggest" participation sports, keeping the legacy title alive in public perception.
Hmm. A bit hand-wavy, that, although I'm pleased to see Gemini immediately labeling the supposed popularity a "myth". But obviously we're not going to accept anything Gemini tells us on face value. Luckily, it's citing sources. Or rather a source. Easy enough to check. Shouldn't take long.
Gemini bases its claims on a 2017 report by the British Disabled Angling Association, which in turn refers to an article in the Daily Telegraph newspaper about the most popular participation sports in Britain. The BDAA piece links to the Telegraph article but the Torygraph (© Private Eye.) has long been behind a paywall and I'm not giving them money to find out what they said in some puff piece almost a decade ago.
Let's assume for the moment that someone at the BDAA read the Telegraph article carefully and quoted it accurately. If so, the reported position of angling (Which is what men who get away from the wife and kids on Sundays by sitting next to canals with a rod stuck in the ground beside them as they swig coffee from a thermos and stare vaguely into space, like to call what the rest of us know as "fishing".) in the 2017 Top Twenty UK participation sports was #19.
So where does it place now? That was ten years ago. I didn't ask for a history lesson, Gemini!
In answer to the question
"What are the most popular participation sports in the UK in 2026?"
Gemini, annoyingly, doesn't come up with a nice, tabulated list, as I was hoping. Instead it somewhat vaguely asserts that
"Football remains the undisputed leader in UK sports participation with roughly 11 million players, closely followed by fitness activities, swimming (4.2 million), golf (1.06 million), and tennis (over 640,000). Emerging trends also highlight rapid growth in racket-blends like padel and pickleball, alongside soaring engagement in casual running and basketball among younger demographics."
The evidence for this comes from a 2025 Press Release about a survey conducted by EY, in which four thousand adults were polled. This survey does come with a tabulated chart, which you can see if you click through. It's ugly and I'm not going to wreck my aesthetic by embedding it. It also only goes to 15, which strikes me as an odd place to stop. Either do a Top Ten or a Top Twenty, guys. No-one wants to see a Top Fifteen.
So, who are - or is - EY? Their About us page says
"At EY, our purpose is building a better working world. The insights and services we provide help to create long-term value for clients, people and society, and to build trust in the capital markets."
Cool. Why they commissioned a survey on sport, I have no idea but it wouldn't have been the first place I'd have looked. Apparently they were Gemini's go-to, though.
Which is a bit of a shame, because not only was EY's survey not conducted in the year I asked for (It's from 2025.) but it's not even a survey about "participation sports". It's called an "Engagement Index" and unless there's something I haven't been told, the second most popular participation sport, one that people in the UK go out and actually do, is not likely to involve driving a $20m racing car, so why is F1 #2 after football on the list?
Wrong year, wrong topic. So much for accuracy.
Originally, though, I didn't ask for the year. I just asked Google
What are the most popular participation sports in the UK?
That got me an AI summary that looked fairly similar, but this time it was drawing its data from an entirely different source, a website called SnookerZone. They did have a nicely-presented Top Ten - and guess what? It was from 2026!
The SnookerZone article, which focuses on the popularity of snooker, or rather the lack of it, as you might imagine it would, doesn't cite any specific source for its chart, other than a vague "Based on typical annual participation estimates..."
I wasn't all that happy with that for an answer either so I left Gemini and drifted down into the search results proper. The top result was a link to something called SPOND, which turns out to be "an app", part of whose mission statement is "Building connections through sports". They're all about getting people to go out and play sport.
Finally! Someone that should know the answers to the questions I'm asking! And they have a list. It's from 2025 but it looks like the best we're going to get. Again, I won't cut and paste it here but if you have any interest in the subject, it's worth a look. It has lots of facts and figures. And pictures!
What SPOND's list doesn't have is attribution. The article on their website is from February 2025 so we have a date but the only source cited and linked is to the FA for Football. My confidence in the rest of the list isn't improved by a basic editing error that transposes a whole load of detail about "Soccer" to the section on Tennis, the #4 sport on the list. Tennis itself doesn't get a mention.
And yes, anyone can make a mistake, but presumably that one's been there for more than a year now. Has no-one spotted it? I feel like some of this might not entirely be Gemini's fault. There's only so much you can do with unreliable data.
On the substantive point, though, once again there's no mention of fishing. Or angling, for that matter. It doesn't even make it into the Honourable Mentions section, which includes Horse Racing. Again, a participation sport? Really?? How many people own a racehorse? I mean, I know you can join a syndicate and just own a leg, but for it to count as a participation sport, wouldn't you have to ride?
So, what has been the point of all this? Other than to poke fun at an AI, which if it isn't already a participation sport, soon will be. You may well ask! It's taken me the best part of an hour and a half and what have I proved? Other than that I really like doing pointless research for its own sake.
Well I've proved, yet again, that Gemini still can't be trusted to answer a simple question with any degree of accuracy. Even when it cites its sources, it's often wrong. The AI summary at the top of Google Search looks very authoritative, sure, but that's an illusion. I regularly follow the links it provides and they are, shall we say charitably, somewhat less than 100% reliable. Sometimes they're inaccurate, sometimes they're irrelevant but sometimes they're actively misleading.
Look, unlike many people whose opinions I have seen recently, I am not against the concept of AIs giving me summaries of search results. I think it's a weird choice for a company, much of whose income relies on advertising, to make but that's not my call.
No, I'd be quite happy if I could type a few words and get the information I need, in a matter of seconds, all handily packaged and ready to cut and paste into a post. If it was good information. If I could trust it not to make me look like a fool, when someone drops into the comments to point out all the errors. I don't need an AI's help for that!
Unfortunately, it's nothing like good information, far too much of the time. Certainly not good enough to use unchecked. If I have to check everything it's going to take me as long as it would to find it for myself. And I can find better sources on my own, too!
If I'm going to use anything an AI tells me here, I know I'm going to have to follow the links and read the damn articles or look at the damn websites or watch the damn YouTube videos for myself. And then, when I find out how unconvincing the sources are, I'm probably going to have to go look for something that actually tells me what I wanted to know, instead of whatever it is that the AI has picked up as matching whatever criteria it's using.
The New Yorker, Gemini is not! I always think it's going to save me time and it never does. Maybe one day...
Oh, and the other thing I guess I've proved is what I suspected all along: that fishing isn't anywhere near as popular an activity as legend (Or "myth" as Gemini puts it.) would have had me believe when I was young. I've done my share of keeping that myth alive, too. Well, no more!
All of which is a very roundabout way back to the beginning, where I was wondering why so many MMORPG devs (And survival game devs and now, apparently, open-world gacha game devs, too.) feel their job is isn't done until they figure out some way to shoehorn a fishing mini-game in, somehow. Anyhow. Just so it's there.
Neverness to Everness has fishing because of course it does. Shame we're out of time today or I'd have told you all about the Fishing Frenzy event. If you play, you won't want to miss it. The event, I mean, not my post about it. When I write one.
I guess that's just going to have to wait until tomorrow!
Notes on AI used in this post
I wouldn't normally bother with uses as trivial as this but since we're being reductionist for Blaugust...
I used the AI summary at the top of a couple of Google Searches as described in excruciating detail in the body of the post. Gemini is the AI in question. Other AIs are available. They may or may not do a better job than Gemini. I wouldn't know. The amusement value in running the same query through several AIs to see which would make the biggest hash of answering wore out a couple of years ago.
I also used SnapEdit to remove all the UI elements from the final picture. You can see the SnapEdit watermark in the lower right corner. That's there because I used the free version, which I recommend. I use it often and normally I wouldn't even think of mentioning it in this footnote (For new readers, footnoting my AI usage in my posts is something I've been doing for several years, mostly because I find it entertaining. If there's no footnote, I didn't use any. Most posts have no footnote.)
At this point, I might mention that I have never really believed SnapEdit does use AI to remove stuff from images. It says it does but it's been saying so for a long time now and I'm not convinced AI was up to doing that back when I started using SnapEdit. I always assumed they just bunged "AI" in as a fashionable buzzword, like everyone else was doing back then.
And what, anyway, is AI in that context? Does it really require an LLM to remove some text from a digital image and replace it with approximately the same color field as what would have been underneath? It seems to me that we've had software that would do that for a long time. A lot longer than we've had generative AI. I've never used PhotoShop because I couldn't afford the license but I've always thought that was exactly the sort of thing people had been using it for for decades.
We need to get some better names for this stuff. It doesn't mean anything to slap AI on every last damn algorithm any more than sticking an "i" on the front of technology or adding "punk" to the end of game titles ever has. I'd bet half this stuff is just good old software playing dress-up anyway...
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