Bowling even more alone: trends towards individual participation in sport

Research question: In the 1990s trends in sports participation in England revealed that participation in individual sports was growing whilst participation in team sports was in decline. This paper examines whether this trend has continued more recently and, if so, the plausible explanations for this trend towards individual sports participation.Research methods: The paper uses secondary analysis of the Active People Survey (APS) from APS1 (2005/2006) to APS9 (2014/2015). The APS is undertaken annually with a sample of 160,000 respondents. It includes data on sports participation by sport type as well as data on organised sports participation including club membership, participation in competitive sport and coaching.Results and findings: The findings demonstrate an ongoing trend of growth in participation in individual sports and, at the same time, a decline in participation in organised team sports in England. This trend towards participation in individual sports is particularly striking when examined against the significant public funding invested into organised sports between 2008 and 2016.Implications: Whilst the findings clearly show the continued shift in patterns of sports participation from team sports to individual, the explanations for this are limited to the application of logic. More empirical work is needed to understand the reasons for the decline in organised sports participation and the growth in individual activities. The data suggest that despite the growth in individual sports participation, community sport policy as a whole has been ineffective, with 43 of 45 government-funded sports showing either no change or decreased participation. These results emphasise the failure of top-down, nationally led, sport-specific plans for growing sports participation and underline problems with the overly normative notion of evidence-based policy and practice. The findings add support to the government’s recent decision to revise community sport policy. Importantly, the new iteration of community sport policy must re-examine the challenge of growing organised sport, be clear about the opportunity offered by informal sport and assess the structures that might more effectively grow sports participation.