Northern League - 2025 Review

It’s that time again: time to review the state of the Northern League (the wargames competition scene in the North of England). I managed to participate in three rounds including a top ten finish in one round. This will be my last year for a while as I'm taking a break from ADLG competitions.

Observations

• The league remains in the settled pattern of the last few years with average players per round in the mid to high twenties.
• The average number of DBMM players continues to decline with falls in 2023, 2024 and 2025 (see below).
• Significantly The number of ADLG players who attended all five rounds increased significantly to five. For DBMM the corresponding figure declined to four.

Data Quality

The "official" DBMM results are always published much later than the ADLG results so I switched to getting the results from http://dbmm.org.uk/. In doing so I uncovered a issue that affects all the DBMM data prior to this year.

The DBMM doubles pairings are fluid. Some players are listed in teams, but I found that it was very common for a doubles team to consist of just one player. This means I overestimated the average players per round for DBMM because I assumed all teams listed as doubles always played as such. The effect is small (of the order of 1 to 2 players per round), but likely to be significant.

There's far too much work involved in correcting the data from 2008-24, but I have used the correct figures for 2025 and will do so in the future.

The same situation does sometimes arise with ADLG but it is very infrequent as the competition is overwhelmingly a singles event: there's only one doubles team listed in 2025. Any occasional, ad hoc, teams (to balance numbers) have their score assigned to both individual's scores not to the team.

Data Set

For those that wish to study the numbers here they are:

Average Players / Round
Year	DBM	DBMM	FOG AM	FOG R	ADLG	Totals
2006	58.0					58.0
2007	38.0					38.0
2008	18.0	7.2	16.6			41.8
2009	7.0	11.8	26.6			45.4
2010		8.8	33.0			41.8
2011		11.0	34.8			45.8
2012		11.6	27.4	5.8		44.8
2013		12.4	19.0	10.0		41.4
2014		12.8	14.4	9.6		36.8
2015		13.4	7.4	8.8		29.6
2016		11.0	4.8	9.6		25.4
2017		11.8			12.6	24.4
2018		13.2	3.2		14.4	30.8
2019		13.2			18.8	32.0
2021		13.0			11.3	24.3
2022		12.8			16.6	29.4
2023		11.4			15.2	26.6
2024		10.4			16.2	26.6
2025		8.6			17.8	26.4

Index of Northern League reviews.