Where sport meets health: activity, inactivity and the opportunity in between (2026)

Sport and health are usually planned, funded and measured separately. The latest data suggests the most valuable ground sits between them: people who are not active enough, people whose bodies are already telling them so, and services that cannot yet keep up with demand.

More active, but not more equal

Sport England’s Active Lives Adult Survey for November 2024 to November 2025, published in April 2026, found that 64.6% of adults in England met the Chief Medical Officers’ guideline of 150 minutes of moderate activity a week. That is around 30.9 million people and the highest level in a decade. Yet 24.7% of adults remain inactive, doing less than 30 minutes a week, only 0.3 percentage points lower than the year before.

The averages hide a widening split. Of the most affluent adults (NS-SEC 1-2), 73.2% are active, compared with 53.8% of the least affluent (NS-SEC 6-8), and Sport England reports that the gap between the most and least deprived areas has grown over time. Adults with a disability or long-term health condition are active at 49.1%, and those aged 75 and over at 44.3%. The survey also flags a new fall in activity among 16 to 34 year olds.

Children follow the same pattern. The Active Lives Children and Young People Survey for the 2024-25 academic year found that 49.1% of pupils in Years 1 to 11 met the guideline of 60 minutes a day, the highest since the survey began. But 28.4%, around 2.1 million, did less than 30 minutes a day. 58% of children from the most affluent families were active, against 45% from the least affluent.

What this means: participation growth is being captured mainly by people who were already likely to move. The people who remain are older, less affluent and more likely to live with a health condition, and they are the least likely to respond to a conventional sport offer. Reaching them is a question of product design and partnership, not just promotion.

The value is large, and modelled

Sport England’s social value model, produced with Sheffield Hallam University and partners and published in November 2025, estimates that community sport and physical activity generated £122.9 billion of social value in England in 2023/24. Within that it estimates around £8 billion of direct net savings to the healthcare system through prevented illness, nearly £6 billion in productivity gains from fewer sick days, and around 900,000 cases of back pain prevented each year. It also estimates that nearly £20 billion more social value would be generated if the least active groups matched the most active.

These are modelled figures, built from Active Lives data and published evidence on the health effects of activity, not observed cash savings. The government’s 10 Year Health Plan, published in July 2025, uses a different estimate of £10.5 billion a year in NHS savings from physical activity, and states that inactivity remains stubbornly high for adults and children.

What this means: the economic case for activity is no longer the obstacle. The obstacle is that the savings are spread across budgets and years. Providers that can show measurable outcomes for a defined population, in terms a commissioner or employer recognises, will win more than those quoting national totals.

Musculoskeletal demand is where the pressure shows

Musculoskeletal health is where inactivity and health services meet most visibly. Government guidance, last updated in 2022, estimated that 30.1% of people in England lived with an MSK condition in 2017, and that 45% of people with a long-term MSK condition were inactive, compared with 20% of those without one.

NHS England’s community health services data for August 2026, published in October, shows 456,532 adults waiting for community MSK services. That is almost half of the 940,725 adults waiting for any community service, and more than the next five largest adult services combined. Around 78,000 had waited more than 18 weeks. The MSK list stood at 425,796 in April 2026, a rise of about 7% in four months, although NHS England notes that the figures are unvalidated management information and that changes in provider submissions affect month-to-month comparisons.

The cost reaches the workplace. The ONS estimates that 148.8 million working days were lost to sickness or injury in the UK in 2025. Musculoskeletal problems accounted for 14.6% of sickness absence occurrences, behind only minor illnesses and a broad other category.

What this means: demand for MSK assessment, rehabilitation and reconditioning is outrunning NHS community capacity, and employers carry a direct cost. Sports medicine, physiotherapy and performance businesses already hold the skills this demand needs. The gap is usually in access, pathway design and evidence of outcomes, not in clinical capability. We found no authoritative national dataset on the growth of private physiotherapy and MSK provision, so we have not estimated its size here.

Policy is moving into the space between

The 10 Year Health Plan commits to letting patients self-refer to MSK services, alongside talking therapies, podiatry and audiology, through a My Specialist tool in the NHS App. It describes the planned My Care service as a digital social prescriber, linking patients to voluntary, social enterprise and local government services. On activity, it sets out a place-based approach across government, with £250 million of investment into 100 places through Sport England and at least £400 million for local community sport facilities. It cites evidence that where investment in activity is designed with local people, inactivity rates are 2.5 percentage points lower than otherwise in the most deprived places.

What this means: self-referral and digital routing will change how people arrive at MSK and activity services. Providers that are visible, bookable and able to report outcomes inside those routes will gain. Sports organisations with facilities and community trust in deprived areas have a stronger case for health-linked funding than at any point in recent years, provided they can show who they reach.

Where the opportunity sits

Three practical conclusions follow. First, design for the inactive rather than the already active: older adults, people with long-term conditions and lower-income communities are where the remaining gains and the health value sit. Second, build pathways that carry people from MSK rehabilitation into sustained activity, so that treatment and prevention form one journey rather than two separate services. Third, measure in health and work terms, such as waits avoided, function regained and absence reduced, because that is the language of the budgets that benefit.

The organisations best placed are those that can work across both worlds: clinically credible enough for the NHS and employers, and engaging enough to keep people moving. Minshall Group works with organisations across health and sport on strategy and digital delivery at exactly this meeting point.