10.5 Million Sport Volunteers and a £6.3 Billion Problem

The Recovery That Is Not Quite a Recovery

Sport England published the latest Active Lives Adult Survey on 24 April, covering November 2023 to November 2024. The volunteering numbers: 10.5 million adults volunteered to support sport and physical activity. That is an increase of 488,000 on the previous twelve months.

Good news, right? Sort of.

10.5 million is still 1.7 million below pre-pandemic levels. The November 2016-17 baseline was 12.2 million. We have recovered about two-thirds of the lost volunteers. The other third — 1.7 million people — have not come back and, nearly five years after the first lockdown, it is increasingly unlikely that they will.

Sport England themselves acknowledged this in a blog post in June titled "Taking the Long View on Volunteering." Their assessment is frank: volunteering levels have been falling over the long term, accelerated but not caused by the pandemic. The decline predates COVID by at least a decade.

£6.3 Billion in Free Labour

Sport England's separate ROI research, published in November using 2023/24 data, puts the replacement cost of sport volunteering at £6.3 billion per year. The social value — primarily wellbeing benefits to the volunteers — adds another £8.2 billion.

Six point three billion pounds. That is the subsidy that British community sport receives in free labour every single year. It is not a government grant. It is not lottery funding. It is people giving their Saturday mornings, their Tuesday evenings, and their annual leave to make sport happen.

When Sport England's 2017/18 model estimated the same figure at £5.7 billion (for 3.9 million sport volunteers at the time), the sector treated it as an interesting statistic. Now the sector is struggling to recruit and retain, and the number feels less like a statistic and more like a warning.

Who Is Not Coming Back

Sport England's data mirrors a pattern seen in the broader inequality research: the demographics of volunteering are not equal, and the post-pandemic gap is widest among groups that were already underrepresented.

Women, disabled people, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds are all less likely to volunteer in sport. The recovery has been strongest among demographics that were already well-represented — older, more affluent, male. Which means the volunteer base is becoming less diverse at precisely the moment the sector is trying to become more inclusive.

This creates a specific problem for clubs in lower-income areas. They tend to have fewer volunteers to begin with, and the volunteers they do have are more likely to face cost-of-living pressures that make unpaid work harder to sustain. NCVO's Time Well Spent survey found 14% of volunteers now worry about out-of-pocket costs, up from 5% in 2019. For volunteers in deprived communities, that figure is likely higher.

What 1.7 Million Missing Volunteers Looks Like at Club Level

Let me make this concrete. Across England, there are roughly 147,000 sports clubs (Sport England's estimate). If you spread 1.7 million missing volunteers across those clubs, that is an average of 11-12 fewer volunteers per club.

In practice, the distribution is not even. Some clubs are fine. Others have lost half their volunteer base and are running on fumes. The clubs most at risk are the ones in smaller communities with ageing populations — exactly the clubs that have no paid staff and no capacity to recruit replacements.

I have talked to clubs that have gone from eight committee members to four. Clubs where the chair is also the secretary and the treasurer. Clubs where a single person is simultaneously the webmaster, the fixture secretary, and the safeguarding officer — not because they want to be, but because nobody else will do it.

At £14.35 per hour (ONS median wage), every volunteer who leaves and is not replaced costs their club roughly £2,200 per year in labour that now does not get done or falls on someone who is already stretched.

The Admin Trap

Here is what frustrates me about the volunteer conversation in sport. Most of the policy discussion focuses on recruitment — how do we get more people to volunteer? — when the more urgent question is: why are existing volunteers leaving?

The answer, over and over again, is burnout. And the primary driver of burnout is administrative workload.

Nobody signs up to volunteer at a cricket club because they love updating spreadsheets. They sign up because they love cricket. Then they discover that "helping out" means learning how to use three different systems, chasing 40 membership renewals by email, manually reconciling the accounts, and spending two hours before every committee meeting preparing an agenda.

The sport part takes 30% of their time. The admin takes 70%. After two or three years of that, they resign. The club loses £2,200 in labour value and 100% of the institutional knowledge that person carried.

If you want to retain volunteers, reduce their admin burden. It is that simple and that hard. Simple because the technology to automate 60-70% of club admin already exists. Hard because the decision to adopt it requires a committee to agree, someone to set it up, and everyone to change their habits.

But the cost of not doing it — in volunteer burnout, in lost labour, in declining service quality — is £6.3 billion per year and counting. Downwards.

Three Things Every Club Committee Should Discuss This Month

1. What is your club's volunteer labour worth? Count your active volunteers. Estimate their weekly hours. Multiply by £14.35 and by 52. Put the number in front of the committee. Most will be shocked.

2. What percentage of that time is spent on admin? Be honest. If your volunteers spend half their time on tasks that are not coaching, mentoring, officiating, or building the club — that is the half you need to eliminate.

3. What would it cost to automate the admin? Compare the cost of a club management platform (typically £30-60 per month) against the volunteer hours it would save. For most clubs, the platform pays for itself within the first month in recovered volunteer time.

The 10.5 million figure is better than last year. It is worse than 2016. The trajectory is not in our favour. The clubs that adapt — that measure their volunteer contribution, reduce administrative friction, and invest in keeping the people they have — will survive. The ones that assume the volunteers will always be there may find, sooner than they think, that they are not.