From Inspiration to Habit: Why Grassroots Participation Needs a System of Its Own

A medal can inspire someone to try sport. It cannot make the local club affordable, open a school facility after hours, provide an inclusive coach or make someone return the following week.

That distinction is fundamental to grassroots sport.

Great Britain provides one of the clearest examples. Ahead of Rio 2016, UK Sport was investing more than £350 million of National Lottery and government funding across 38 Olympic and Paralympic sports, alongside targeted investment in coaching, talent development, sports science and medicine. Team GB subsequently won 67 Olympic medals, finished second in the medal table and became the first host nation in Olympic history to improve its medal total at the following Games.

It was a remarkable demonstration of what a focused performance system can achieve.

But London 2012 also carried a broader promise: to inspire more people to participate in sport. That proved much harder. In England, the proportion of adults participating in sport at least once a week fell from 36.9% in 2012 to 35.8% in 2015. A later parliamentary review concluded that the participation legacy had fallen short and recorded Sport England’s assessment that the original approach had been too assumptive about national programs generating local behavioral change.

Olympic performance	Mass participation in England
15 total medals at Atlanta 1996	36.9% of adults playing sport at least once a week in 2012
67 total medals at Rio 2016	35.8% of adults playing sport at least once a week in 2015
1 gold medal became 27 gold medals	Elite success rose while weekly participation fell

The lesson is not that elite investment was wrong. It is that elite performance and mass participation require different systems.

Since then, England’s participation model has evolved substantially. Participation is measured more systematically, investment is increasingly targeted toward inactive populations and disadvantaged places, and the focus has shifted from simply providing opportunities toward understanding the barriers that prevent people from becoming, and remaining, active.

Four questions determine how mature that system really is:

1. Are participation levels growing across the population, or mainly among those already easiest to reach?
2. Can people access affordable, high-quality opportunities regardless of where they live or who they are?
3. Does school sport create a bridge into long-term participation, or does participation end at the school gate?
4. Is inclusion built into the system, or addressed through isolated programs for groups left behind?

A rising average can still hide a participation problem

England’s headline participation trend is now strong.

In 2024/25, 64.6% of adults in England, 30.9 million people, met the guideline of at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week. That is 3.3 million more active adults than when the Active Lives survey began in 2015. The proportion classified as inactive has also fallen.

That represents meaningful progress. But national averages only answer the first layer of the participation question.

Among adults, 67.3% of men were active compared with 62.2% of women. Activity stood at 53.8% among the least affluent adults compared with 73.2% among the most affluent. Only 49.1% of disabled people and people with long-term health conditions were active, while participation among Black and Asian adults stood at 57.2% and 56.3% respectively.

Group	Share meeting 150+ minutes per week (2024/25)
Most affluent adults	73.2%
Men	67.3%
National average	64.6%
Women	62.2%
Black adults	57.2%
Asian adults	56.3%
Least affluent adults	53.8%
Disabled people / long-term conditions	49.1%

The system can therefore improve overall while participation inequalities persist, or even widen.

This is where England’s model has changed significantly since London 2012.

Sport England’s Active Lives surveys provide recurring national measurement of adult and youth activity, while its ten-year Uniting the Movement strategy explicitly puts inequality at the center of participation policy. Rather than assuming that increasing the total supply of sport will benefit everyone equally, the system increasingly uses demographic and geographic data to identify who is not being reached and why.

That matters because participation is not one behavior.

Organized club sport, recreational sport, gym activity, walking and active travel can all contribute to an active population, but they require different interventions. A country may increase overall physical activity without strengthening community clubs. Equally, federation registrations may rise without materially reducing population inactivity.

A mature system should therefore measure both breadth and depth:

• Breadth: How many people are active, and which population groups are not?
• Depth: How frequently do people participate, in what form, and do they remain engaged over time?

The policy question then changes from “How do we get more people into sport?” to “Which people are not active today, what is stopping them, and what intervention is most likely to change their behavior?” That is a considerably more useful starting point.

Access is not a facility count

Participation strategies often equate access with infrastructure: Build facilities. Establish clubs. Provide programs.

But a facility can exist and still be inaccessible.

It may be too expensive, too far away, unavailable at the right time, poorly connected by transport or unsuitable for women, older people or people with disabilities. A technically available opportunity is not necessarily a practically accessible one.

England’s participation data demonstrate the importance of place. Adults living in the most deprived areas remain significantly less active than those in the least deprived areas, and Sport England reports that the gap between communities has widened over time.

The response has increasingly shifted from national programs toward place-based intervention.

Sport England is investing £250 million of National Lottery and government funding into place-based work, targeting the greatest resources toward areas with both high inactivity and wider social need. The model combines Active Lives data with deprivation, health and community indicators and works through local organizations to understand barriers that may differ significantly from one community to another.

That is an important evolution.

A centrally designed program can be efficient to administer, but the reason people do not participate is often intensely local.

In one community, the limiting factor may be a lack of facilities. In another, facilities may exist but transport is poor. Elsewhere, cost, safety, cultural expectations, coaching or confidence may be the real constraint.

The strongest systems therefore do not simply ask: How many facilities or clubs exist? They ask: Can the people we want to reach realistically use them?

The same principle applies to existing assets. The UK government’s sport strategy estimates that around 35% of sports facilities are located behind school gates, creating an obvious opportunity to use infrastructure more intensively by opening it to communities outside school hours.

This changes how governments should think about grassroots infrastructure.

Before building another facility, understand whether the constraint is actually capacity, accessibility, affordability, programming or utilization.

A mature participation system does not maximize the number of assets. It maximizes the number of people who can realistically use them.

The school gate is where lifelong participation is won, or lost

If grassroots sport is intended to create lifelong behavior, schools are the most important point of intervention.

They are one of the few institutions capable of exposing almost every child to physical activity regardless of family income, parental sporting interest or proximity to a club.

England has built substantial infrastructure around this opportunity.

The government encourages schools to provide at least two hours of PE per week, while the School Games system connects schools to organized competition. In 2021/22, a national network of around 450 School Games Organisers provided more than two million participation opportunities and ran 25,000 events. In total, the School Games program has generated more than 13.4 million participation opportunities.

Yet the national outcome remains incomplete.

In 2024/25, 49.1% of children and young people aged 5-16 met the guideline of an average of at least 60 minutes of activity per day. That is up from approximately 43% when the Active Lives Children and Young People survey began in 2017/18 and represents around 580,000 additional active children. But more than half still do not meet the recommended level.

And the gaps are substantial:

• 52% of boys were active compared with 46% of girls;
• 45% of children from the least affluent families were active compared with 58% from the most affluent;
• Participation was 43% among Asian children and 41% among Black children.

These numbers illustrate why school sport cannot be measured through PE hours or competition entries alone.

The more important question is what happens next.

Does a child who enjoys basketball at school know where to play outside school? Is there an affordable local club? Is there a suitable beginner session? Can the family reach it? Does the child return after the first experience?

The UK government’s own strategy acknowledges the need to strengthen connections between schools and community clubs and to make better use of school facilities outside the school day.

For a leading participation system, the conversion chain should therefore look something like:

Each stage should be measurable.

This is where the maturity test becomes more demanding. A country should not only know how many children received PE or attended a school competition. It should understand how many develop positive attitudes toward activity, how many continue participating, and how effectively schools connect children to opportunities outside the education system.

The distinction matters because the objective of school sport is not simply to produce active schoolchildren. It is to help produce active adults.

Inclusion is not a campaign. It is a design standard.

Women, people with disabilities, lower-income communities and some ethnic groups remain less likely to participate in sport and physical activity in England.

The traditional policy response is to create an inclusion program.

A mature system goes further.

It asks why the mainstream system excluded those groups in the first place.

England’s This Girl Can campaign is a useful example of this shift. It was developed specifically in response to the persistent gender gap in physical activity and built around research into barriers such as fear of judgment, time, cost and confidence rather than simply telling women that exercise is beneficial. Sport England reports that more than four million women have been inspired to become active through the campaign since 2015. Its latest phase is increasingly focused on women from underrepresented communities, including through dedicated Black women’s and South Asian Muslim women’s advisory groups.

But campaigns alone cannot solve structural exclusion.

If facilities remain inaccessible, coaching is not inclusive, programs are scheduled at unsuitable times or costs remain prohibitive, communications can generate awareness without creating sustained participation.

The same applies to disability. Sport England reports that disabled people and those with long-term health conditions remain substantially more likely to be inactive than those without them.

Leading systems therefore embed inclusion across:

• Strategy: explicit participation objectives for underrepresented populations.
• Funding: resources targeted toward demonstrated participation gaps.
• Facilities: physical and practical accessibility.
• Programs: formats designed around different motivations and needs.
• Workforce: coaches and administrators capable of inclusive delivery.
• Measurement: outcomes segmented by gender, age, disability, geography, income and other relevant characteristics.

This is a more demanding standard than counting the number of inclusion initiatives launched.

A country can operate dozens of programs for women or disabled people and still maintain a large participation gap.

The real maturity test is whether the gap closes.

Great Britain’s real lesson: participation needed a different machine

Great Britain’s Olympic transformation remains an extraordinary example of system design.

Funding was concentrated. Objectives were explicit. Performance was measured. Resources followed medal potential. Institutions understood their roles.

And it worked.

The error was assuming that the same elite success would automatically cascade into mass participation.

London 2012 demonstrated that inspiration can generate attention, pride and intent without necessarily creating sustained behavioral change. Parliament’s subsequent assessment was clear that a major event should not be expected to generate participation simply by existing.

England’s participation model has since moved toward a different logic with encouraging results: adult and youth activity in England are at their highest recorded levels under the current Active Lives measurement systems. But persistent gaps by income, disability, ethnicity, gender and geography show that the system is not yet complete.

That may be the most useful lesson for emerging sports nations.

Building an elite-performance system means finding and developing the few. Building a participation system means designing for everyone.

The article series and engagement is led by Marc Esterer, Director Business Development, and Alexander Strulak, Strategic Partnerships Advisor & Communications Manager.

Sources: UK Sport (Two Years to Go to Rio 2016; British Athletes Make History in Record-Breaking Rio Games); UK Parliament, Committee of Public Accounts (Grassroots Participation in Sport and Physical Activity); UK Parliament, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (Major Cultural and Sporting Events); Sport England (Active Lives Adult Survey November 2024-25; Active Lives Children and Young People Survey 2024-25; Uniting the Movement; Place Partnerships; This Girl Can); UK Government (Get Active: A Strategy for the Future of Sport and Physical Activity; School Sport and Activity Action Plan).

A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.