Football is one of the most popular sports in the world. Whether you’re in Brazil or Birmingham, Lithuania or Liverpool, the chances are high that you’re going to see someone with a football looking to kick it around and enjoy themselves. Even in America, where the sport has traditionally struggled to take off, ‘Soccer Moms’ have existed for decades, taking their young ones to play ‘soccer’ on a weekend in order to get them out of the house.

The question is, how many people who played the game as a kid carry on playing it when they get older? Is it something that moves from childhood to adulthood or does it get left behind

It is Difficult to Know For Sure

The reality is that it is all but impossible to tell for certain how many people decide to continue to play football when they get older instead of just knocking it on the head. There are no real statistics out there that can point us obviously and clearly to how many children played the game in school, say, but then decided to carry on once they’ve become adults.

Many will lose interest when they go to university, knowing that there is no way for them to carry on at the same level that they did whilst they were children and it was structured into their school time, instead having to find the time themselves to play in a team.

Children at football academies are more likely to ‘get hit by a meteorite’ than succeed as professionals – here’s the shocking statistic pic.twitter.com/5TG3VjqT5Z

— Grassroots (@Teamgrassroots_) July 5, 2017

Even if people manage to find others to play with whilst at uni, the likelihood is that they will then lose their way once they enter the professional world of jobs. Should you be lucky enough to work somewhere with a football team, you would have to get on with everyone enough to want to actively engage in playing football on a regular basis with them as well as work alongside them, which obviously isn’t always the case.

In the majority of working environments there is no way to carry on playing football, so many people simply stop, perhaps occasionally enjoying a game with some friends or having a kick about with family in the park instead.

What we Can Learn From America

Whilst it is difficult to know with any degree of certainty how many people have decided to continue playing football in the United Kingdom after having done so as a child, we can learn some things from our friends over in the United States of America.

A poll carried out by NPR alongside the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health discovered that around three-in-four adults played sport when they were younger. In spite of that figure, though, only around one-in-four carried on playing sports as an adult, meaning that there was a drop-off of close to 50% in terms of participation.

Around 25% of adults in America play sports of some sort. As many as 50 different sports were listed as the ones that people engage in as adults, but there was a significant gender gap in play. Men are more than twice as likely to take part in sports than women, with 35% of men saying that play some sort of sport when compared to 16% of women. Golf and basketball are the sports that men are most likely to play, whilst for women it is running or track and baseball or softball.

As adults get older, there is then a sharp decline in how much sport they are likely to play, which is shown by the following table:

Why Adults Continue to Play Sports

The number one reason given for why adults decide to continue to play sports is for their health. Of those spoken to, 48% said that they did vigorous or moderately intense exercise regularly. Of those that choose to exercise, 71% do it in order to improve their health, lose weight or to stay in shape.

Those that exercise more regularly tend to be more educated than those that don’t and also to have higher incomes. In spite of the known benefits of exercise, more than 40% of Americans don’t engage in sport of any sort. There is a sense, perhaps, that they look how they look and doing exercise isn’t likely to make much of a difference.

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Of course, playing golf in America usually sees the participants use buggies to get around, so the impact on their health is likely to be much lower than something like running or weightlifting. Yet there is still going to be some benefit when compared to those that choose not to play any sport or do any form of exercise, with some engagement always likely to be better than none whatsoever.

What we can take from the work of poll is that not many people are likely to carry on with their sport as they get older unless they are looking to make some sort of impact on their lives from a health point of view, in which case they may well decide to.

Kids Still Get Encouragement

Although the decline in sport as people get older might suggest that they don’t see any benefit in carrying it on, the reality is that most parents still encourage their children to take part in sports. Of those parents that had children in middle school or high school, 89% of them said that their child benefits a ‘great deal’ or ‘quite a bit’ from participating in some form of sport.

Although the majority don’t play sport themselves anymore, around 72% said that it was either likely or somewhat likely that their child would carry on taking part in sport when they grew older. The main reasons why they wanted their kids taking part in sports were as follows:

Interestingly, in spite of the incredible odds stacked against it happening, around four in ten adults with household incomes of less than $50,000 per year hoped that their child would become a professional in their chosen sport. That drops to 20% of parents when the household income is over $50,000, showing how it is seen as a possible way out of their financial difficulties and the pressure that is put on children to perform as a result.

Unfortunately, lower income households also find it much more costly for their children to engage in sporting activity in the first place, which obviously limits hopes for the future.