Sport brings people together.

Few claims appear more often in sector strategies. The claim is familiar. What it asks leaders to do is not.

Connection can describe belonging within a group, trust across difference or access to institutions. These are related social goods. They are not interchangeable.

Until now, that ambiguity has carried little cost.

Two social tailwinds may make that imprecision consequential.

Together, they raise both the value sport could create and the cost of being vague about how.

Connection is not disappearing. Digital contact is abundant. What appears scarcer in everyday life is dependable, recurring, face-to-face contact.

In New Zealand, weekly face-to-face contact with friends outside the household fell from 78.9% in 2008 to 64.9% in 2023, according to Treasury’s Living Standards Framework dashboard. Across 21 European OECD countries with comparable data, the OECD found that daily face-to-face contact with friends and family fell between 2006, 2015 and 2022 while remote contact increased.

These aggregate signals do not describe everyone’s social life, and neither measure captures recurring group life directly. Together they point to a plausible shift: dependable contact in person may be harder to find.

Scarcity can change value. As dependable, embodied connection becomes harder to find, experiences that reliably provide it may become more distinctive to people and families. One label for this emerging market thesis is the connection economy. Early signals include run clubs, social fitness formats, communal wellness and membership concepts that make gathering part of the offer.

This remains an emerging thesis rather than a settled economic category, and sport does not own the opportunity. Libraries, arts organisations, workplaces and faith communities can all provide recurring social contact.

Sport nevertheless has useful ingredients: shared activity, repeated encounters, local reach and roles through which people can contribute. The activity gives people a reason to gather and, sometimes, to keep returning to the same people.

There is also a catch. If meaningful connection becomes a premium product, people with the fewest social and economic resources may be least able to buy it. A market response cannot be the whole public response.

Sport has many of the ingredients to benefit from a world in which connection is more valuable. It is also trying to become more convenient.

To compete for limited time and attention, sport is redesigning offers around flexibility, informal participation and episodic formats. Much of that adaptation is necessary: fixed schedules, long seasons and high commitment can exclude people whose lives do not fit the traditional offer.

But, as explored in When Friction Is the Feature, removing barriers can also remove some of the recurrence, expectation and shared obligation through which people become known.

The question is what must remain dependable around the flexibility for relationships to have time to form.

The second tailwind is institutional. Governments and public agencies are paying more attention to loneliness, belonging, trust and social cohesion.

In 2025, the World Health Assembly adopted a resolution on social connection. In New Zealand, the Ministry of Social Development continues to update the national picture through Te Korowai Whetū, while Sport NZ’s futures work includes trust and cohesion among its drivers of change and anticipates greater policy emphasis on sport’s capacity to bridge cultural and demographic gaps.

The indicators help explain that attention. Treasury’s dashboard shows that adults’ sense of belonging to New Zealand fell from about 88% in 2021 to about 83% in 2023, while trust in others fell from about 65% to about 59%. A 2026 Helen Clark Foundation report, based on a survey of 2,882 adults in late 2025, reported declines across every dimension it measured.

As explored in The Dining Table, when cohesion is under pressure, the places where people gather, return and become known start to look different. They begin to resemble social infrastructure rather than incidental extras.

Where the tailwinds meet

Consider the same Saturday sports programme. A parent values it because their child finds friends. A council may value it because it brings different communities into contact.

Those claims are related. They are not interchangeable.

There is evidence behind sport’s social claim. A systematic review of adult sport participation reported a range of psychological and social benefits, while Sport NZ’s Social Value Bank assigns value to individual outcomes such as becoming a member of a sports club.

The evidence supports sport’s capacity to create individual social benefits. It does not show that every format produces them, or that belonging inside one group changes relationships across society.

Connection describes social ties. Cohesion concerns what the wider pattern of those ties makes possible.

For this argument, I use the relational definition in the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework: whether diverse people and groups are willing to trust and cooperate in the interests of all. I also think sport’s public claim must consider how people relate to institutions.

A person can feel known and supported within a team while the group does little to change how different communities relate or how institutions respond. Connection may contribute to cohesion. It is not proof of it.

The word connection is being asked to carry more weight than its precision allows.

As I looked more closely, one pattern kept recurring: sport uses connection as an umbrella for several social jobs: belonging within groups, ties across communities and access to institutions.

These distinctions are easy to state. They are harder to find in sport’s strategies.

A working review of published strategy material from ten prominent New Zealand national sport organisations reinforced that pattern.[^1]

The review does not suggest an absence of social value. It shows that one agreeable word is carrying several different claims.

Connection survives strategy processes because few people disagree with it. That is also its weakness.

Sport’s inherited advantage is not a strategy.

The umbrella can obscure who is meant to benefit, which conditions matter and what evidence would count. Leaders may assume connection is inherent while designing out the conditions that help it form. They may weaken the experience families value, fund the wrong layer or make a public claim a programme was never designed to support.

Sport does not need to invent a better vocabulary. Social-capital scholarship has already done much of the sorting.

The distinction between bonding, bridging and linking separates ties within groups, ties across social boundaries and ties between people and institutions. A recent OECD framework applies the same distinction to place-based policy. I think sport would benefit from adopting that vocabulary.

Return to the Saturday programme.

Bonding concerns whether children and families become known and supported within the group. Those ties can create belonging, identity and mutual support. They can also enforce conformity, concentrate opportunities among insiders or harden the boundary against newcomers. Strong bonding is not automatically public value.

Bridging begins when meaningful contact crosses a social boundary, within the programme or between it and another group. Diverse attendance alone is insufficient. Intergroup-contact research finds that reasonably equal status, shared goals, cooperation and institutional support can create better conditions for contact to reduce prejudice.

Linking asks whether families gain a credible route to a club, school, council or other institution—and to the authority, voice, resources or opportunities it holds. The route remains incomplete when the institution is present but unresponsive.

These are parallel and contingent social jobs, not a hierarchy or guaranteed sequence. A targeted experience might properly prioritise safe belonging; an inter-club initiative may focus on relationships across groups; institutional access requires a credible route into voice, leadership or opportunity.

The more useful question is:

Which ties are we trying to support, between whom, for what reason—and what role should they play?

Sport already understands specificity.

We do not expect the same training stimulus to produce every adaptation. Social outcomes deserve the same discipline.

Naming the tie does not tell a leader how to support it. A stable team and a rotating format can both keep children active, yet create different chances for recognition and friendship. Evidence that sport can produce social benefits does not settle how much continuity a group needs, whether a recurring coach can compensate for changing peers or what is lost when the format changes.

Many coaches, clubs and culturally grounded community approaches already tend these ties deliberately. The task is to make the intended social job more explicit in the choices that shape it.

Belonging within a group, trust across difference and access to institutions depend on different relationships. They require different conditions and different evidence.

The opportunity is not to make a bigger claim. It is to apply greater specificity: name the tie, identify between whom it should form, fund the conditions that give it a credible chance and test whether it did.

Sport can bring people together. The strategic question is what kind of togetherness it is trying to create.

Keep showing up,
Hamish

[^1] Note: The working review was completed in July 2026 and covered published strategy material from New Zealand Rugby Union, New Zealand Rugby League, New Zealand Football, Netball New Zealand, New Zealand Cricket, Basketball New Zealand, Hockey New Zealand, Tennis New Zealand, Athletics New Zealand, and Rowing New Zealand. It was a structured sample, not a census of every national sport organisation or an assessment of all operational practice.