The NBRH Sports Trends Report 2025

Turns out your mate Steve isn’t alone in his sudden obsession with padel. Across Britain, people are moving again—but not in the ways anyone expected. Five-a-side leagues are thriving on WhatsApp. Park tennis courts are overbooked. Pickleball is a thing now. And, somewhere in your postcode, a group of thirty-somethings is doing burpees in a business park before work.

But this isn’t just a quirky cultural shift. It’s a meaningful one. Beneath the sweat and social posts is a deeper story about how we live, connect, and cope in modern Britain. In a time of economic pressure, healthcare gaps, and digital overload, sport is quietly stepping in as a kind of social infrastructure. Here’s what the data says—and what it really means.

What We Say We Do vs. What We Actually Do

Let’s begin with the gap between our imagined selves and the statistical truth. Sport England and YouGov data suggest football still reigns supreme, with 28% of active Brits claiming to play, mostly via informal five-a-side leagues or community kickabouts. Swimming comes next at 20%, followed by cycling at 14%, and racquet sports like tennis and badminton close behind. On paper, Britain looks like a nation of active, well-balanced athletes with full diaries.

But zoom out and the façade cracks. Thirty-five percent of Brits openly admit they used to play sport but don’t anymore. Another 29% confess they’ve never played at all. That figure jumps to 37% for women. The gender gap is stark—only 9% of women say they’re very interested in sport, compared to 35% of men. Among young people, the disparity is even worse, with young men four times more likely to report high interest than young women.

This isn’t just about who’s sweating—it’s about who sees sport as “for them.” These gaps aren’t accidental; they’re cultural. Generational norms, social confidence, body image, time poverty, and affordability all play into who participates and who doesn’t. Re-engaging lapsed athletes isn’t just about access—it’s about storytelling. Campaigns should treat inactivity less like a blank slate and more like a rekindling. Don’t start with “try something new.” Start with: “Remember when you played netball every Tuesday?”

The Return of the Team

The pandemic made solo sports the default. Running, cycling, and home workouts surged, while team sports stalled under distancing rules and facility closures. But in 2023 and 2024, the pendulum swung back. Team sport participation rose 6%—led primarily by men, but with growth across age groups. Football leagues refilled, community rugby bounced back, and basketball gained new fans. Even older adults are joining the party, with walking football and senior-friendly netball drawing surprisingly consistent attendance.

This isn’t just post-pandemic rebound. It’s emotional recalibration. During lockdown, movement was about maintaining sanity in solitude. Now, it’s about reclaiming community. Team sports provide structure, accountability, and low-pressure socialising. You show up, play your position, and then maybe grab a pint. It’s social, but with fewer of the ambiguities that make modern friendship hard to maintain.

Here’s what policymakers often miss: this return to team sport isn’t about fitness, and it’s definitely not about competition. It’s about infrastructure for connection—especially for those who don’t want to “catch up for coffee” or share feelings on a Thursday night. In a country wrestling with a loneliness epidemic, team sport isn’t just a leisure activity. It’s a service.

Pickleball and the New Rules of Participation

Padel. Pickleball. Spikeball. Dodgeball leagues. British sport has entered its “slightly silly but surprisingly popular” phase—and the numbers back it up. Padel has grown to over 50,000 regular players. Pickleball doubled in size last year, with an estimated 40,000 now playing. And that’s just the start: the LTA wants padel players in the hundreds of thousands by 2025.

Why are these sports booming? First, they’re easier. You don’t need elite fitness or technical ability. The rules are forgiving. You can learn in minutes. Second, they’re inherently social. Doubles play, small courts, frequent breaks—it’s sport that leaves space for chat and laughter. Third, they’re novelty-driven. There’s cultural cachet in doing something slightly obscure and low-pressure. And crucially, these sports bypass traditional hierarchies. You don’t need to join a club, own a £200 racket, or learn the lore of Wimbledon. You just show up, and you’re in.

But here’s the real insight: this is less about sport and more about a cultural appetite for low-commitment community. Padel is rising because Britain doesn’t want prestige—it wants play. If you’re building facilities, running a sports brand, or developing a fitness product, the winning formula isn’t elitism. It’s ease + novelty + sociability. Bonus points if it’s fun to say.

The Death of the Gym (Sort Of)

Gyms are still around, of course. But culturally, they’re losing relevance. According to Ordnance Survey data, 50% of Brits say they avoid gyms because they feel judged. One in four says they feel embarrassed working out in front of others. And more than half cite price as a barrier.

Meanwhile, public parks are booming. Outdoor bootcamps, parkruns, run clubs, and calisthenics meetups are transforming local green space into open-air leisure centres. Parkrun alone sees nearly 190,000 participants every week. Community halls and school sports halls are also key—quietly powering Zumba classes, walking football, and budget-friendly badminton.

Cost of living plays a huge role. In a year when gym memberships feel like luxuries, people default to what’s free, nearby, and emotionally safe. Which means local authorities and health campaigns need to stop over-indexing on gym partnerships and start funding the obvious: floodlights in parks, open-access indoor spaces, and equipment lending libraries.

If gyms want to stay relevant, they need to tackle the confidence barrier directly. Host “quiet hours.” Remove mirrors. Create introvert-friendly zones. Until then, people will keep jogging in the rain and texting their mates about five-a-side in the school sports hall.

When We Play: Structure Is Everything

Most Brits don’t have endless time to get active. They have tiny, repeatable pockets—weekday evenings and weekend mornings. Strava and parkrun data confirms it: 6–8pm is peak group run time during the week. Saturday at 9am? Non-negotiable. It’s parkrun o’clock.

Winter still kills momentum. Participation plummets in bad weather, and an autumn storm in 2024 cut parkrun numbers by more than half. But the deeper pattern is predictability. Sport succeeds when it respects people’s constraints. Nobody’s signing up for a 3pm Thursday spin class if they’ve got kids, a commute, or a boss with trust issues.

This is the missed trick in most health campaigns: they ask people to change their routines, rather than fit into them. The smart operators—like parkrun, five-a-side leagues, or casual run clubs—get this. They offer anchor points. If you want to drive participation, make it regular, local, and low-effort to join. Don’t sell flexibility. Sell ritual.

Who’s Actually Playing?

The demographics aren’t surprising. Young men dominate traditional sport. Midlife adults drop out. Older adults walk more than ever. But peel back the stats and something more interesting appears.

Introverts are finding a home in team sports. Not because they love people, but because structure removes social ambiguity. You know the rules, your role, and the rhythm. No small talk, just play. Meanwhile, extroverts are increasingly drawn to solo sport—as long as there’s an audience. Running alone is fine, as long as you’re smashing Strava segments and racking up digital kudos.

Gen Z, in particular, is reshaping the fitness landscape. They’re 29% more likely to work out in groups than Millennials. One in five has gone on a date through fitness activity. And women are leading the social fitness boom, with an 89% rise in Strava club memberships among women in the past year.

The real takeaway? Participation is no longer just about age or gender. It’s about personality, platform, and purpose. To engage people, you need to understand why they move—not just when or where.

The Quiet Power of Tech

It’s easy to assume fitness tech is all about VR boxing or Peloton hype. But the real engine of the movement boom? WhatsApp. That’s where five-a-side teams are managed, run clubs are organised, and squash ladders are negotiated. It’s not flashy—but it’s effective.

Platforms like Strava and Fitbit turn otherwise invisible effort into social capital. You ran? Prove it. You cycled? Post the map. It’s low-key accountability through gentle surveillance. And while YouTube workouts no longer dominate headlines, they still drive millions of home fitness routines every week.

The lesson here is clarity: tech doesn’t need to reinvent sport. It just needs to reduce friction. Tools that help people organise, commit, compare, and repeat are far more impactful than those trying to gamify movement into oblivion. Build for behaviour, not novelty.

Class Still Decides Who Moves

Let’s not pretend this is a level playing field. Sport in Britain is still deeply shaped by income, location, and class. The explosion in padel and boutique fitness is happening alongside the quiet decay of local leisure centres and public pitches. London boroughs have some of the worst facility-per-capita ratios in the country. And energy costs have squeezed dozens of council-run pools and gyms into closure.

The net result? Access now hinges on postcode. If you live near a well-maintained park, a surviving community centre, or a forward-thinking council—you’re golden. If not, good luck. Sport has become both a tool for wellbeing and a mirror of inequality. If you’re designing public health strategies, this should be your flashing red light. It’s not about convincing people to move. It’s about giving them somewhere to go.

Where It’s All Headed

So what’s next? Here’s where we’re placing bets:

• Hyper-local sport will keep growing. Think WhatsApp-organised leagues, neighbourhood park runs, and school-hall badminton.

• Fitness as therapy will formalise. Expect more walking groups, hike clubs, and movement-based mental health programmes.

• Social-first apps will dominate—tools that connect people locally, simplify group organisation, and reduce drop-out friction.

But the biggest shift? Sport is no longer about performance. It’s about participation, play, and presence. In an overstimulated, under-connected country, it’s one of the last things people do together without agenda.

Final Thought

In 2025, sport is doing more than keeping us fit. It’s quietly holding together parts of British life that are otherwise fraying—friendship, wellbeing, purpose, even local identity. It’s how people meet, reset, laugh, reconnect, and—for a lot of us—cope. So if you’re a policymaker, a brand, a tech developer or a strategy lead wondering how to reach people where they actually are—look at that muddy pitch, that WhatsApp group chat, that 9am parkrun queue.

They’re not just playing. They’re rebuilding something.