Popularity
Rugby union is the most popular sport in Samoa, with 12 provincial unions made up of around 120 clubs and nearly 5,000 senior and twice as many junior players in a country with a population of just under 175,000 people.
Prominent Samoan players include Freddie Tuilagi, Apollo Perelini, Lome Fa'atau, Lolani Koko, Pat Lam, Brian Lima, current sevens captain Lolo Lui, and two winners of the IRB International Sevens Player of the Year Award in Uale Mai and Mikaele Pesamino.
The huge numbers of players playing professionally abroad can work to Samoa's disadvantage when it comes to team training as it is difficult to get them all together as a squad. But Samoa still manage to remain competitive on the world-stage and are regarded as tough opponents.
Read more about this topic: Rugby Union In Samoa
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)