Unsporty Nation - Introduction

Introduction

Most people think they already know where a book about participation in sport is heading.

They assume it’s for the sporty, about the sporty – written to make everyone else feel guilty for not exercising enough.

This is not that book.

This book begins from the opposite truth: that most people in Britain do not see sport as “for them” – and that this single belief quietly shapes our national health, our education system, and our social fabric far more than we admit.

Ask adults why they aren’t physically active and the story is remarkably consistent.
Their experience of sport began at school. They were picked last. They felt exposed. They tried the limited choices on offer because they had to – and concluded, not unreasonably, that sport simply wasn’t their bag. It was far too early to know whether they lacked talent or motivation. They were simply never shown anything that might fit.

Another group did enjoy sport once. They were active at school or university, and then drifted away not out of choice but circumstance. Jobs, commutes, childcare, cost, time – life made the old model too difficult to sustain. Only those who excelled, or who had the time, friends and access to organise things themselves, managed to continue. Everyone else stopped because the system offers only one way to take part: the all-in, always-there club membership that modern life no longer accommodates. The cliff-edge after university is written into the membership curve of every sport.

Two groups, two problems. Both symptoms of structural failure.

For years, I found this baffling, particularly during twelve years running National Governing Bodies - the organisations tasked with the role of developing sport. What I saw was a country full of clubs, facilities, coaches, volunteers, and people whose lives have been shaped by sport. And yet the figures don’t lie: millions of children grow up believing it isn’t for them; and millions of adults drift away because the system makes staying in too hard.

The work that led to this book began as an attempt to understand why these major disconnects seemed impossible to bridge. It grew out of an unusual career spent darting between worlds that rarely speak to each other – from fast-growing start-ups to government departments, from youth work to national sports governance. Eclectic on paper; revealing in practice. In each, I kept seeing the same thing: good intentions scattered across a system that does not know how to connect them.

From Betfair - the technology company that disrupted the betting industry, where I was a member of the founder team - I learned how dramatically behaviour changes when you make the alternative easier. From OnSide Youth Zones - the charity dedicated to offering young people somewhere to go, something to do, and someone to talk to (for which I chaired a nine-year project in White City to raise money through public/private partnership to build a state-of-the-art facility for young people) - I found out, first, that 85% of children’s waking hours are spent outside the classroom, and second, that almost no public policy is designed around that truth. At Holyport College - a state boarding school in Berkshire where I was a governor for five years - I saw that the gulf between state and independent education lies not inside the classroom but around it: in the co-curricular world of opportunities that build confidence, identity and belonging. And as Chair of Archery GB and British Rowing - National Governing Bodies with remits for groups of people with completely different skillsets and interests - I confirmed not just how powerful sport can be, but how extraordinarily hard it is for our current structures to turn potential into practice.

One small moment kept echoing back to me. When I joined the board of Archery GB – still a novice who had barely held a bow – I searched for my nearest club. While I expected a desert, what appeared was a constellation: clubs scattered all around me, hiding in plain sight. It was the jolt of realisation that told me this: the opportunities exist, but the pathways do not.

Once you’ve seen that in one sport, you notice it everywhere else. We give children, at school, an astonishingly narrow menu of possibilities; then we give clubs the impossible task of catching those who fall through the gaps. Neither group has either the time or the tools to bridge the divide, and so the majority quietly drifts away. In the process, sport hardens into a product designed for the already-sporty, when its real power lies in serving the nation as a whole.

This book is an attempt to redraw that map. It argues that the real untapped infrastructure in this country is not facilities, but the connection between them: the clubs that sit empty all day; the specialist environments most children never see; and the latent expertise of coaches and volunteers. Together, the possibilities that surround us without us ever really noticing.

It argues that the biggest gains – in health, education, confidence and community – can be found in the people who feel furthest from sport, not closest to it.

And it argues that the solution need not be complicated: connect the parts that already exist; widen the offer so that children can discover something that fits them, rather than forcing them to fit the offer; and make participation flexible enough to fit real lives.

The chapters that follow map that idea: why we lose people early; why we lose people later; why institutions keep solving the wrong problems; and what might happen if – instead of designing strategies for the sporty few – we built systems that also serve the unsporty many.

So this isn’t a book about becoming a sporty nation, in the sense of requiring everyone to take part in organised sport. It’s a book about becoming a healthier, happier, more connected one – by finally using the infrastructure that has been sitting in front of us all along.