Every match secretary I know says the same thing: turnouts are down from what they were fifteen years ago, and it’s not close. I’ve watched my own club’s midweek matches go from a reliable 20-plus turnout to struggling to fill 10 pegs some weeks.
I don’t think match fishing is dying, exactly, but I do think it’s changing shape in a way that looks like decline if you’re only counting traditional club match numbers. A lot of the anglers who’d have fished a Sunday club match twenty years ago are now fishing commercial “silvers and carp” opens instead, or doing informal pairs and social matches organised over WhatsApp rather than through a formal club structure. The appetite for competitive fishing hasn’t disappeared – it’s moved into different, less formally counted formats.
What has genuinely declined, I think, is the pool of anglers coming up through match fishing as their introduction to the sport, the way I did as a kid. Junior sections at a lot of clubs are thin, and match fishing has an image problem with younger anglers who came to the sport through carp fishing content on YouTube rather than through a local club scene.
My honest view: club match fishing specifically is declining, but competitive angling more broadly is not. If clubs want to reverse it, junior coaching and social, low-pressure match formats – the kind that don’t require someone to already own a full match kit – are probably a better investment than trying to bring back the traditional Sunday match exactly as it was.
Gear that fits this
If you’re kitting out for this, these fit.
For floats and terminal gear, Guru Slim Pencil Pole Float 0.3g, ICM In-Line Match Cube-20g and Slow Sinking Feeder-Large are all worth a look.
Baits worth adding: Dynamite Baits Frenzied Target Sweetcorn Scopex Yellow, Van Den Eynde Crushed Hemp 500g and DNA Baits Stick Mix Crayfish Heavy bag And Feeder Mix 1kg.
On the reels side, Wychwood Agitator Series 1 BR-FS Reel-5500, EOS 12000 FS Reel and 22 Power Aero 14000 XTC Reel.
Rods: Aquos Ultra-W Waggler Rod-11ft, N'Zon 2.0 Feeder Rods-12’ Method Feeder 2pc and N-Gauge Pro Distance Feeder Rod-11ft.
Dan Whitfield grew up in Liverpool and started fishing aged seven on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at the end of his road. He never really stopped. He spent his twenties and thirties on the match circuit – club level rather than national – before deciding he’d rather catch one decent fish than a net of small ones.
These days he mostly fishes the River Dee for barbel and chub (barbel personal best 14lb 2oz, from the Trent on a trip south), the Leeds and Liverpool Canal for roach and skimmers in winter, and the occasional gravel pit when tench are spawning and the surface fishing is too good to miss. He’s a former club secretary and coaches children on Saturday mornings at a junior section of a Liverpool angling club, where most sessions start with a float, a tin of maggots and a lot of patience.
At The River Bend, Dan writes the coarse species guides, river fishing technique articles, and the match and pole content.
Covers: Barbel, bream, roach, tench, carp (coarse context), river fishing, canal fishing, feeder, float, match/pole