#GET YOUR KIT TOGETHER
GRASSROOTS SPORT HAS LONG PLAYED A CRUCIAL ROLE IN BOTH THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH OF MEN, FOSTERING COMMUNITY AND BELONGING, WHILE PROVIDING AN OUTLET FOR STRESS. BUT WITH PARTICIPATION AND FUNDING DOWN, MANY ARE LOSING OUT. MH MEETS THE PLAYMAKERS WORKING TO TURN THE GAME AROUND
After 10 years together, our weekend five-a-side game ended this January, not with a bang, but with a WhatsApp. Even though I’d left London three years earlier, I couldn’t leave the group chat, because Saturday morning on the astro at William Tyndale Primary School in Islington had been the highlight of my week for the best part of a decade. Through the flux of my thirties – marriages, births, a death – football was a fixture. And in London life, ‘Willy T’, as we affectionately called it, was one of the only times I’d reliably see my mates.
One Saturday in March 2020, I joked with those assembled at Willy T about the coronavirus, then novel. A few days later, I boarded a train to Teesside with my wife, two children and one large suitcase, to ride out the escalating weirdness for what we thought might be a few weeks at my mother-in-law’s. We didn’t know it at the time, but we’d just left London for good. I was fortunate enough to have family and remote work, but I didn’t have mates or football. And while I can’t say that lack of football was the reason for my deteriorating mental health, I can say it didn’t help.
A 2017 review commissioned by public body Sport England found a ‘strong association’ between better mental wellbeing and sport or physical activity; social interaction was ‘central to this’. Sport and fitness were linked to greater self-confidence and potentially reduced anxiety and depression. Less happily, a 2020 report led by Manchester Metropolitan University found that the lockdown halt in play left participants anxious and disconnected.
Sport England’s Active Lives survey for the restriction-free year to November 2022 indicated a bounce back to pre-Covid levels. But while team sports had ‘overall recovered’, stabilising at around 3.1 million players, participation was still down from 2016 levels by 400,000; running, despite a spike mid-pandemic, was down by 1 million.
Christopher Mackintosh is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University who led the lockdown report. He tells me that grassroots sports participation is ‘flatlining’. There’s been little progress since the government’s Sporting Future strategy was announced in 2015, pledging to ‘tackle head on the flatlining levels of sports participation and high levels of inactivity’, with mental wellbeing identified as a ‘key outcome’.
Those participating in grassroots sport are, says Dr Mackintosh, typically the same people who did previously: white, mi
