The nation is obsessed with house prices and the property market. But what is the UK even more obsessed with? Sport.
When there’s a major sporting event, does our attention shift from property portals to pitches, courts and tracks?
Back in October 2024, we published an article exploring how major sporting events can have a negative impact on the housing market. With the sporting calendar giving us plenty to work with in the last twelve months, we revisited this topic to see whether sport has actually knocked the housing market off its usual course. We looked at new instructions (supply), SSTCs (demand), withdrawals and asking prices. Housing market data follows clear weekly and seasonal patterns, regardless of sporting events. We see the market slow down markedly before Christmas and then pick up again in spring. To isolate the effect of an event, we have compared the event window against a baseline: the median value on the same day of the week, drawn from the eight nearest weeks before and after that date (excluding UK bank holidays and any other event window).
The chart below shows the whole 12-month shape of the market with each sporting event marked. The graph demonstrates that the deep trough into Christmas and January/February, then the spring rebound, are far bigger movers of volumes than any single sporting event.
Weekly New Instructions and SSTC, 1 Sep 2025 – 31 Aug 2026, with sporting-event windows shaded
Aside from The Ashes, no event shifted new instructions or SSTC by more than about 3.5% off its seasonal baseline in either direction. The Ryder Cup stands out, but not for negatively impacting the housing market; new instructions actually rose 7.5% above the norm. Wimbledon and the World Cup show demand softening, with SSTCs down by around 3% in both cases, though supply barely changed during the World Cup.
Percentage deviation from the weekday-matched, nearby-week baseline, by event.
The Ashes series (21 Nov 2025 – 8 Jan 2026) produced the largest deviations in the whole dataset. New instructions were down 35.2%, SSTCs fell by 37.9%, and withdrawals declined 22.7% versus the baseline. One look at the dates of The Ashes immediately flags seasonality - can this dip be attributed to Christmas, rather than cricket? The same calendar window one year earlier saw new instructions down 29.8%, SSTC 31.1% and withdrawals 14.6% versus the baseline. So once that seasonal “no cricket” baseline is subtracted, the cricket-attributable effect is a further 5.5 points on new instructions, 6.8 points on SSTC, and 8.1 points on withdrawals. This suggests the cricket had a large secondary effect. Perhaps the five Test matches played through UK nights for seven weeks kept people tired, distracted and glued to a screen. For the Christmas week (26–30 Dec), SSTC were 89.5% below baseline due to industry closure, so it was excluded from the estimate.
Percentage deviation from baseline, 21 Nov–8 Jan, compared year-over-year. Grey = the same window twelve months earlier (no overnight Test series); blue = 2025/26, with the Ashes.
Withdrawals were actually down during 8 of the 9 sporting events, with fewer sellers taking their property off the market. Wimbledon was the only exception, with withdrawals up 2.4% versus the baseline.
Withdrawn = a For Sale listing taken off the market entirely, no sale agreed.
Only one Bank of England base rate change fell in the past 12 months: a cut from 4.00% to 3.75% on 11 December 2025. It has held at 3.75% at every meeting since. The rate cut landed exactly as the market was already at its deepest seasonal trough, so it is not possible to cleanly separate a “rate cut bounce” from the ordinary January pickup that happens every year regardless of monetary policy.
Monthly New Instruction and SSTC totals, with the year’s only base rate change marked.
When we look at the market as a whole, over the last three years of data, annual new instruction volume has grown each year slightly (1.63m in 2023/24, to 1.70m in 2024/25, to 1.71m in 2025/26), while annual SSTC eased by around 5% in the most recent 12 months versus the year before (1.26m to 1.20m). This is independent of any single sporting event or rate decision.
Have the last 12 months of sporting events impacted the housing market? Overall, we’re not seeing a significant impact. Longer, higher-engagement sporting events such as The Ashes, Wimbledon and the World Cup did appear to soften buyer demand, but only by a modest 3-8 percentage points.
What is perhaps more interesting is what happened on the supply side. Withdrawals fell during 8 of the 9 sporting events we analysed, suggesting that sellers were largely staying the course. It could be that sellers were distracted by sport and happy to leave their properties ticking over on the portals rather than take them off the market.
In the current economic environment, sporting events are not really moving the needle when it comes to the housing market. The bigger test could come from the Autumn Budget on 28th October, which has the potential to have a much greater impact on market confidence.
The Bank of England’s decision to hold Bank Rate at 3.75% will at least provide some stability, particularly in a price-sensitive housing market. Let’s hope there are no surprises in the Budget that could unsettle an already fragile housing market.