Can the World Cup get boys off screens and outdoors?

Well, almost. It is actually being held in the USA, Canada and Mexico. We have already had the granular analysis of why the English football manager Thomas Tuchel has selected the wrong people for his squad, or rather, left out many of the right people for reasons unknown to every expert pundit.

What is interesting is that Tuchel has stressed the importance of teamship in his selections. It builds on Gareth Southgate’s outstanding work in creating an England team that was actually a team. A brilliant lesson in leadership skills applied to one of the hardest challenges - getting young millionaires to get on with each other.

As Tuchel said in his press conference, teams win tournaments. And as Steven Gerrard has recently acknowledged, the so-called golden generation of Beckham, Scholes, Lampard and himself was riven with factions and never felt like a team. Hence losing as they did.

Teams matter because they can engender a sense of belonging and deepen friendships. These matter to everyone, but they are particularly true for boys and men, who need reasons to reach out to each other and different ways to bond. Good teams enable that process. But trends have been moving away from enabling sports teams or other forms of teams where boys have traditionally found kinship, mateship and purpose.

Over the last three decades, Britain has experienced two overlapping trends that have reshaped childhood, community sport and civic life: the long-term dwindling of school playing fields and a weakening culture of male volunteering in youth organisations and grassroots sport.

The decline of school sports space began most dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s. According to widely cited estimates, around 10,000 school playing fields were sold off in England between 1979 and 1997, often to raise money to bolster school budgets or local authority finances.

Although tighter protections were introduced after 1997 - including requiring consultation with Sport England on planning applications - the overall decline in available recreational land has continued in various forms. Between 1992 and 2005, the National Playing Fields Association estimated that more than four in ten school and community playing fields in England had been lost. Since 2010, hundreds more playing-field sales have been approved.

Analysis by The Pitch Inspection published in 2024 found at least 279 approved school playing-field sales between 2010 and 2023. Additionally, the number of grass pitches for community sport has also declined sharply. One estimate suggested England lost nearly 2,500 grass pitches after 2010.

You cannot create team sports if there is nowhere for them to play. These reductions in space and opportunity, combined with the rise of the online universe and activities such as gaming, mean there has been a steep decline in childhood physical activity, a weakening of grassroots sports participation and damage done to social cohesion and communities. This is particularly evident in the most deprived communities in urban areas.

Alongside the physical loss of sporting infrastructure has been a quieter social change: fewer men volunteering regularly in community organisations, coaching and youth leadership.

Historically, male volunteering was a major pillar of British civil society, with men serving as sports coaches, scout leaders, youth club volunteers, referees, team managers, and cadet and Duke of Edinburgh leaders, to name a few.

According to Sport England, there are still more than three million volunteer coaches across England, with some 67% of volunteer coaches or instructors being male, and 60% of sports volunteers overall are men.

However, organisations across youth sport report recruitment and retention problems, especially among younger working-age men. The reasons cited include insecurity of many jobs; the role of bureaucracy and safeguarding with the rise of the surveillance economy, meaning more stringent checks on who you are.

Additionally, there is a fear of allegations and reputational harm. While necessary for child protection, these changes have made volunteering feel more formal and professionally regulated than in previous generations.

Civic institutions that served as anchors of community activity, such as churches, trade unions, social clubs, pubs and neighbourhood associations, have been greatly reduced, weakening the pipeline for volunteering.

Moreover, broader volunteering rates have fallen across England. Government survey data shows formal and informal volunteering have both declined since the early 2010s, with monthly volunteering now at its lowest recorded level in recent years. (GOV.UK)

The decline is especially apparent in traditional uniformed youth organisations. The Scout Association has modernised and diversified successfully in many respects, including admitting girls and expanding inclusivity. However, like many youth organisations, it has struggled in some areas to recruit sufficient adult volunteers — particularly men under 50.

The result of all these changes, when combined with the rise of social media, has meant that too many boys and young men are inside, in darkened rooms, crouched over screens rather than outside enjoying the mateship that being part of a team can bring.

It is to be hoped that England and Scotland do well in this year’s World Cup. But this time around, will it help stimulate growth in team sports, or will young men and boys simply move from watching games on TV to going back to gaming in their bedrooms?

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Nick Isles is the Director of the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys.

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