Sport, Belonging and Young Men

Building civic pride and connection across generations

Prepared by Intergenerational England and Intergenerational Music Making

Executive summary

Young men in England are in trouble, and the country is starting to notice. Suicide remains the leading cause of death for men under 50. One in four young men reports chronic loneliness. Economic inactivity among men aged 16–24 has reached its highest level in a decade. And a generation of boys and young men is forming its sense of identity, masculinity and belonging in online spaces that government, parents and communities are struggling to reach.  This is not a wellbeing issue. It is a civic one. When young men disconnect from community life, the consequences show up across mental health services, the labour market, public trust, and  increasingly community safety and cohesion.  Government has rightly identified sport as part of the answer. But sport delivered in age-segregated silos will not solve a structural problem. The missing ingredient is intergenerational design: the intentional creation of conditions in which young men build sustained, reciprocal relationships with older men and women, through sport and physical activity, in trusted community settings. 

The evidence shows that intergenerational sport reduces loneliness, builds civic identity, strengthens positive models of masculinity, and creates the kind of durable social infrastructure that isolated young men most lack the kind that holds when the programme ends.  Intergenerational England (IE) and Intergenerational Music Making (IMM) are already doing this work. Across 1,500+ projects in schools, care homes, hospitals and community settings, in active research partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, and through our role as secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Tackling Loneliness and Connected Communities, we have generated practice evidence and policy frameworks that are ready for national application.  We are submitting this paper because DCMS has a window through the Civil Society Covenant, the Youth Strategy, and current sport investment to fund and scale a model that works. We want to help design it.

The Problem: Young Men Are Disconnecting

A generation of young men in England is growing up more isolated, less trusted by institutions, and less connected to community life than any comparable cohort in living memory. The data is consistent across every domain that matters to government.

Suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 50 in the UK. Around three quarters of all suicides are male. In 2024, 5,717 suicides were registered in England and Wales, the highest number since 1999, with a male suicide rate of 17.1 per 100,000 (Office for National Statistics, October 2025; Samaritans, 2025).

27 per cent of men aged 16 to 24 report feeling lonely sometimes, always or often (DCMS Community Life Survey, 2024 to 2025). This is the figure DCMS used to launch its Team Up campaign in January 2026.

25 per cent of boys aged 11 to 16 report feeling lonely sometimes, always or often (Sport England Active Lives Children and Young People Survey, 2024 to 2025). Loneliness is taking hold before adulthood.

512,000 young men aged 16 to 24 are now NEET, more than the equivalent figure for young women. Male economic inactivity in this age group has risen consistently since 2017 (ONS Labour Force Survey, November 2025; House of Commons Library, 2026).

The number of working-age men who are long-term sick has reached 1.338 million, the highest figure on record, an increase of 380,000 since the pre-pandemic period. This is the trend that prompted the government's independent review of youth inactivity, led by Alan Milburn, launched in November 2025 (ONS Labour Force Survey, 2025).

Severe loneliness is estimated to cost around £9,900 per affected person per year, through its combined impact on wellbeing, health and productivity. This is the figure cited in the DCMS-commissioned monetisation analysis and used by the Campaign to End Loneliness, Nesta, and Treasury (DCMS Loneliness Monetisation Report, 2020; updated in subsequent analyses).

What the figures do not show

The numbers describe the surface. The deeper shift is that young men are forming their identities, friendships and worldviews in environments that older generations cannot see and often cannot influence. Online ecosystems now play a structural role in how young men understand masculinity, relationships, work and trust. Some of those spaces are constructive. Many are not. The national conversation prompted by the Netflix series Adolescence in 2025 made visible what frontline practitioners have been reporting for years: that boys and young men are increasingly disconnected from older male role models in their everyday lives, and that the vacuum is being filled by influencers, algorithms and peer groups operating outside the reach of schools, families or community institutions.

This is the context in which the loneliness data sits. A young man who is lonely, out of work, and forming his sense of self online without trusted adult relationships is at significantly higher risk of poor mental health, economic inactivity, withdrawal from civic life, and in the most serious cases, susceptibility to harmful ideologies and behaviours. The link between male isolation and broader societal harms, including violence against women and girls, is now established in the evidence base and named in government strategy.

Why sport matters here, and where it falls short

The government has rightly recognised sport as part of the response. The launch of Team Up in January 2026, supported by the Premier League, the FA, England Boxing and figures including Jonny Wilkinson and Luke Littler, signals a serious cross-sport effort to use community sport as a route into connection for boys and young men.  But sport on its own, delivered in age-segregated formats, will not produce the civic, relational and identity outcomes the country now needs. Sport England's Active Lives data continues to show that men aged 16 to 34 from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are among the least active groups in England, with participation falling in the most deprived areas. These are the same young men the Youth Strategy is trying to reach, the same young men disappearing from civic life, and the same young men whose absence from older men's lives is shaping a generation of broken cross-age relationships in both directions.

Sport is one of the few remaining settings in English public life where men of different ages still gather around shared activity. That makes it strategically irreplaceable. The next section sets out why intergenerational design is what turns sport from a participation programme into a connection programme.

Across community sport settings in Greater Manchester, the researchers found that while sites exist that serve both older and younger people, the vast majority do not take a specific intergenerational approach. The social benefit of genuine intergenerational contact, reduced prejudice, increased trust, stronger civic identity, is not happening by accident. It requires intentional design.

Why Sport Alone Isn't Enough - connection across community matters

Sport can create shared experience, belonging and purpose. It is one of the most reliable ways to bring people together around something they actually want to do, which is why government investment in sport for boys and young men is well-evidenced and welcomed. Team Up is the right starting point, but conventional sport programming carries a structural weakness that limits what it can achieve on loneliness. It is almost entirely age-segregated. Boys play with boys. Young men play with young men. The under-18 squad trains on Tuesday, the over-35s on Thursday and the two groups rarely meet. This is true across grassroots football, boxing gyms, athletics clubs, leisure centre programming and most of the community sport infrastructure that is funded.

When young men play sport only with other young men, they accumulate what the political scientist Robert Putnam calls bonding capital: connection within a peer group that often shares the same precarity, the same disillusionment and the same absent relationships with older generations. Bonding capital has real value. It is not what is missing. What is missing is bridging capital, the connections across social difference that hold civic life together. Bridging capital is what young men in England are running out of and it is not produced by playing sport with other young men of the same age, background and worldview.

Young men do not live in a vacuum, they move between school, work, home, online life and community settings and it is in those everyday spaces, not on a pitch, that loneliness takes hold. A weekly football session may improve physical health and provide temporary connection, but if a young man returns to a social world that is age-segregated, transactional, and thin on meaningful relationships outside his peer group, the structural conditions driving his isolation remain untouched. The session ends. The community does not begin.  The evidence from a decade of delivery and from the wider sport-for-development literature is consistent. Short-term, peer-only interventions produce short-term results. What builds lasting resilience is not a programme but a community, one where a young man has relationships that span generations, where he is known by people who are not his age and where that belonging is embedded in the fabric of the places he actually lives. Cross-generational connection in community settings does something sport alone cannot. It creates the social infrastructure that holds people when the programme ends.

This is not an argument against sport. It is an argument for designing sport differently, as a bridge into community life rather than a substitute for it. The early findings from research underway with Manchester Metropolitan University reinforce the point. Across community sport settings in Greater Manchester, sites that serve both older and younger people exist, but the vast majority do not take a specifically intergenerational approach. The social benefit of genuine intergenerational contact, including reduced prejudice, increased trust and stronger civic identity, is not happening by accident in those spaces. It requires intentional design.  The Team Up and the Youth Strategy now have an opportunity to close.

The Intergenerational Difference

It is important to be precise about what intergenerational practice means and what it does not. A leisure centre that runs a youth football session in one hall and a walking group for older men in another is multigenerational. It is also a missed opportunity. An intergenerational programme would bring those two groups into shared activity by design, with facilitation that builds relationships across the age gap and structures that allow those relationships to deepen over time.

The research definition that anchors this work, drawn from Kaplan (2002), describes intergenerational practice as reciprocal and ongoing exchanges between people of different generations that are mutually beneficial and promote understanding, respect and social cohesion. Reciprocity is the part that does the most work. It rules out the older-volunteer-helps-troubled-young-man model that often gets labelled intergenerational but is in fact one-directional. It requires that young men are participants rather than recipients, and that older participants bring something other than wisdom. They bring time, presence, and the everyday social texture that young men have lost access to.  This reciprocity is what produces the outcomes that matter most to DCMS. Reduced loneliness. Stronger community identity. Increased trust in institutions. What Kaplan, Sanchez and Hoffman (2017) describe as civic pride across the generational spectrum, the sense that the place you live is yours because the people in it know you across age, background and life stage.  For young men specifically, the intergenerational difference also addresses something that peer-only sport cannot. It puts them in regular, low-stakes contact with older men who are not their fathers, teachers, coaches or employers. Men who are simply present in the same community, doing the same activity, week after week. That kind of relationship, ordinary and undramatic, is what the evidence base on positive male development consistently identifies as protective. It is also what the current cohort of young men has the least access to.

The evidence base

The case for intergenerational sport as a loneliness intervention is grounded in four converging evidence streams. 

1. Health inequality and prevention 

The Marmot Review, ten years on, demonstrated that community-based, non-clinical interventions reduce health inequalities more effectively than service-level responses (Marmot et al., 2020). Greater Manchester, where IMM and IE are most active, has disability-free life expectancy among the lowest five per cent in England, with an estimated economic cost of up to £1.6 billion annually from increased NHS demand and reduced productivity (Greater Manchester Combined Authority, 2024). For young men specifically, the prevention case is strongest. The conditions that drive avoidable male mortality and morbidity in mid-life, including isolation, untreated mental ill health, substance use, economic inactivity and disengagement from primary care, are forming in adolescence and early adulthood. Intergenerational sport sits precisely in the preventative space the Marmot framework identifies, and the space the government's Health Mission has prioritised.

2. Social capital and civic trust 

Putnam's distinction between bonding capital (within groups) and bridging capital (across groups) provides the clearest theoretical account of why age-segregated sport, however well delivered, cannot on its own rebuild civic life (Putnam, 2000). Bridging capital is what erodes most sharply in declining communities, and what young, isolated men most lack. Intergenerational sport, properly designed, creates structured opportunities for bridging capital across age, which in turn generates the civic trust and collective efficacy that sustain communities over time. This is the foundation of the Civil Society Covenant's emphasis on relational, place-based infrastructure.

3. Sport-for-development evidence 

A substantial body of work, including Coalter (2013) and Spaaij (2011), confirms sport's potential for social inclusion and community cohesion. The same body of work is clear that this potential is activated by design, facilitation and relational quality, not by physical activity alone. The design principles that distinguish high-impact sport-for-development programmes (consistent relationships, reciprocity, shared goals, time) map closely onto the principles of good intergenerational practice. This convergence matters because it means an intergenerational sport programme is not adding a new methodology to sport delivery. It is making explicit what the best sport-for-development practice has always implicitly relied on.

4. Place and demographic context 

ONS projections confirm that by 2041, England's population aged 65 and over will have grown by 50 per cent (Office for National Statistics, 2023). Manchester's population aged 65 and over already grew by ten per cent between 2011 and 2021. Young men, with a median age of 31 in Manchester, are living in communities that are ageing around them, increasingly disconnected from the older generations they share streets, transport and public space with. Urban diversity makes the case more, not less, urgent. Manchester's Asian population grew from 17 per cent to 21 per cent between 2011 and 2021, creating conditions in which cross-generational contact can bridge multiple dimensions of social difference at once.

What We Are Already Doing

IMM is a national not-for-profit Community Interest Company founded in 2018 by Charlotte Miller and based in Woking, Surrey, with delivery teams in London, Manchester and across the South East. Across more than 1,500 projects and over a decade of practice, IMM uses music, creative practice and physical activity to connect generations in care homes, schools, hospitals, housing, libraries and community settings throughout the UK.  IMM has already moved into sport-based intergenerational delivery. In Manchester, the Move and Groove programme combines music-led movement with structured physical activity and has engaged more than 500 young people across South and Central Manchester over the past two years, working in partnership with schools, housing providers, libraries, youth organisations and the Manchester Metropolitan University Institute of Sport. Move and Groove has been recognised with an ISCA award for its contribution to community physical activity. In June 2026, IMM began a 12-month partnership with the NFL Foundation UK, delivering an NFL Flag programme to young people aged 11 to 20 from underserved communities in South and Central Manchester. The programme is youth-led and co-designed, combining inclusive non-contact sport with structured teamwork and reflective practice, with evaluation embedded through MMU from the outset. It is precisely the kind of community sport programme, accessible, intergenerational in its facilitation model, and rooted in place, that the Team Up campaign and the Youth Strategy are seeking to grow.  IMM's wider campaign work is also nationally recognised. The Talking Generations campaign was recognised at the Markel 3rd Sector Care Awards in the Campaigning for Change category. These are nationally recognised models for what happens when intergenerational design is taken seriously.

Intergenerational England is the national policy, advocacy and infrastructure body working to embed intergenerational thinking into government, health, housing, education and business policy. IE was co-founded by Charlotte Miller and Emily Abbott. Emily also serves as Programme Director of IMM, and Charlotte as Founder of IMM.  IE provides the secretariat to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Tackling Loneliness and Connected Communities. This role places IE at the centre of cross-party parliamentary work on the issues this paper addresses, in regular contact with ministers, officials and parliamentarians across both Houses.

IE and IMM function as a delivery and systems-change partnership. IMM generates practice evidence on the ground. IE takes that evidence into national conversations, government consultations, parliamentary inquiries and cross-sector policy work. This combination is unusual. Most national bodies in the loneliness, sport, ageing or youth spaces operate at one end of the practice-policy spectrum or the other. IMM and IE operate at both, which means the policy positions IE advances are grounded in delivery, and the delivery IMM leads is shaped by an active understanding of the policy environment it sits within.

IE is also co-investigator on a major research programme, in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, currently with the Nuffield Foundation. The programme, Intergenerational Relational Infrastructure, investigates how multigenerational civic spaces across Greater Manchester can strengthen intergenerational connection, participation, health and trust. Its research questions map directly onto current DCMS priorities: how demographic change and loneliness are reflected in sport and leisure, how sport and leisure can promote intergenerational trust, and how intergenerational participation can be embedded in social policy.

The IMM Model: Sport, Music and Community by Design

Most interventions targeting young men's loneliness treat sport, creativity and mentorship as separate offers. IMM's model treats them as inseparable. The evidence from a decade of intergenerational delivery is that lasting connection requires multiple points of entry, and that the combination of music, physical activity and cross-generational relationship produces outcomes that none of these elements achieves on its own.

Music creates emotional access and lowers the barriers that sport alone can raise. For young men who are disengaged, guarded, or carrying experiences that make structured activity feel exposing or threatening, a music-led warm-up, a rhythm-based session or a shared creative moment can open something that a coach's instruction cannot. Sport then provides the shared physical challenge, the team identity and the progressive structure that build confidence and routine over time. Mentorship from older community members, people who show up consistently, who know participants by name, who bring a different relationship to effort, patience and failure, provides the relational depth that makes the whole thing stick.

IMM has delivered it at scale. Move and Groove has been active across South and Central Manchester for combining music-led movement with structured physical activity in schools, housing providers, libraries, youth organisations and the Manchester Metropolitan University Institute of Sport. More than 500 young people have taken part. The programme is intergenerational in its facilitation, with older and younger participants working alongside each other, each bringing something the other lacks, and embedded in the community infrastructure young people already use.

In June 2026, IMM began its 12-month NFL Flag partnership with the NFL Foundation UK, delivering non-contact American football to young people aged 11 to 20 from underserved communities in South and Central Manchester. Youth-led and co-designed, the programme combines inclusive sport with structured teamwork and reflective practice, with evaluation embedded through MMU from the outset. NFL Flag's format creates natural conditions for cross-generational facilitation: older community members as coaches and mentors, younger participants as peer leaders, the sport itself as a shared language that does not depend on prior knowledge or established skill.

What IMM has learned, and what the research with Manchester Metropolitan University is beginning to confirm, is that the goal of this work is not attendance. It is rootedness. A young man who leaves a session having played sport is fitter. A young man who leaves having played sport alongside someone thirty years older, who shares his neighbourhood, who will be there next week, is connected. That connection, multiplied across a community and sustained over time, is what reduces loneliness, builds civic identity and rebuilds the social infrastructure young men have lost.  The model is replicable. The principles are clear. The infrastructure to scale it exists. What is needed is the policy and funding architecture to do so.

The Programme We Can Help Design

1: Intergenerational Sport Hubs 

Intergenerational Sport Hubs. Community sport venues, leisure centres, parks, football clubs, boxing gyms, redesigned as age-integrated spaces with intentional programming that brings young men into structured activity alongside older men and women. Not parallel sessions. Not mentoring schemes where older means wiser. Shared physical activity in which the relationship is genuinely reciprocal. IMM's existing partnerships in Manchester, including with Platt Lane Sports Complex, schools, youth organisations and housing providers, provide ready-made pilot infrastructure. The MMU research framework informs the design principles.

2: Civic Pride Through Sport 

 Civic pride through sport. Sport does not only build health. It builds identity. A programme that connects young men to their local communities across generations produces civic pride, the sense of investment in place and in people beyond the immediate peer group, that is the structural antidote to the withdrawal characterising the loneliness crisis. This component would work with local authorities and Active Partnerships to embed intergenerational design into community sport commissioning, with the research framework providing the evidence base for what works, for whom, and under what conditions.

3: The Young Men's Social Connection Protocol

The Young Men's Social Connection Protocol. A practitioner-facing framework, developed with IMM's delivery experience and IE's policy expertise, that translates intergenerational design principles into actionable guidance for sport coaches, youth workers, housing officers and community organisers. This is the missing infrastructure. Sport England's Uniting the Movement strategy and the Civil Society Covenant both call for this kind of relational, place-based design. Neither currently provides the practitioner-level guidance to deliver it. The Protocol would close that gap, with a national rollout pathway through existing Sport England training and Active Partnership networks.

4: National Evidence and Learning

National evidence and learning. A research and evaluation framework, led by MMU in partnership with IE and IMM, that generates nationally transferable evidence on what intergenerational sport produces for young men's wellbeing, social connection, civic engagement and economic participation. This is not evaluation as afterthought. It is built into delivery from day one, using validated wellbeing instruments aligned with ONS measurement standards, longitudinal participatory methods, and institutional analysis of how the model interacts with existing local commissioning structures. 

Conclusion

Young men's loneliness is not primarily a sport problem. It is a social infrastructure problem. Sport is one of the most powerful sites in which that infrastructure can be rebuilt, but only if the sport is designed with intergenerational connection as an explicit goal.  The data is clear. Young men in England are facing the highest rates of loneliness, suicide, economic inactivity and civic disengagement of any comparable cohort, and the conditions producing this disconnection are forming earlier and lasting longer than any previous generation has experienced. 

Government has rightly identified sport as part of the response. The launch of Team Up in January 2026 signals serious intent. What will determine whether that intent translates into measurable change is the design of what sits behind it.  The evidence exists, the delivery model exists, the research partnership exists. Intergenerational England and Intergenerational Music Making are ready to build something that makes a measurable difference for young men, for the older generations whose lives they share, and for the long-term health of civic life in England.  

CONTACTS 

Emily Abbott | CEO & Co-founder, Intergenerational England |  Programme Director, Intergenerational Music Making 

Charlotte Miller CEO & Co-founder, Intergenerational England | Founder, Intergenerational Music Making