Forty percent of Europeans who do not play sports cite the same reason: they don’t have time. This figure comes from Special Eurobarometer 472, a survey conducted in December 2017 across the 28 EU member states and published in 2018. Since 2015, 118 million people have participated in the European Week of Sport, while WHO data documents a global rise in physical inactivity over the recent period. Work organization can be an obstacle to physical activity, but it is already being addressed in certain policies and public health recommendations relating to the workplace.

The essentials

  • Forty percent of non-practicing Europeans cite lack of time as the primary barrier, according to Special Eurobarometer 472 (2017-2018).
  • The European Week of Sport brought together more than 15.1 million participants in 2025 and 118 million since 2015. These figures measure the stated reach of the European Week of Sport, not its effect on sedentary trends.
  • The Icelandic trials focused on reducing working time to 35-36 hours per week without salary reduction; no measured increase in physical activity is established by the report consulted.
  • Monitoring indicators prioritize participants and event outreach; documented monitoring of regular practices among the same individuals remains marginal in official dashboards.
  • Refounding the success indicator around regular practice requires integrating work time policies into public health dashboards.

118 million participants, sedentary behavior that is not declining

The European Week of Sport is, on paper, a success. Launched in 2015 by the European Commission, it mobilizes millions of Europeans every September around free and accessible physical activities. Fifteen million participants in 2025. One hundred eighteen million since the first edition. The figures are real, documented, and regularly highlighted in official communications.

The published dashboards prioritize the reach of the event—participants, events, and countries—rather than documented monitoring of individual habits. Economist Diane Coyle, in The Measure of Progress, formulates a diagnosis applicable to this case: when a public policy adopts an easily visible output indicator, it ends up optimizing that output rather than the real outcome it was seeking to produce. Counting participants in the Week of Sport is like counting tickets sold to measure culture: you know how many people came in, not whether they read.

The real outcome, here, would be regular physical practice. The WHO recommends 150 minutes of moderate activity per week for an adult. In the European Union, roughly one-third of the population does not reach the minimum recommended level of physical activity. Available data does not allow us to say that this figure has remained unchanged in Europe over ten years. The Week of Sport creates an appreciated annual event, brings together communities, and gives visibility to clubs and associations.

These effects remain real but limited. They do not solve the structural problem: available data do not make it possible to determine the annual level of physical activity of participants in the European Week of Sport.

The obstacle that sports policies do not address

Special Eurobarometer 472 (conducted in 2017, published in 2018) poses the question directly to non-practitioners. Their responses form a stable hierarchy. Forty percent cite lack of time first. Far behind: cost, lack of interest, absence of nearby facilities.

Lack of time, then, translates a specific reality. An average European worker works between 35 and 40 hours per week depending on the country, adds commute times often exceeding an hour round trip, manages family and household constraints. What remains, after paid work and unpaid domestic work, shrinks substantially according to time use data. It is in this residue that sports policies attempt to fit in.

The result is predictable. Free or subsidized sports offerings meet unequal demand depending on social categories and their schedule availability: retirees, self-employed workers, stay-at-home parents, executives with flexible schedules. Eurobarometer 472 shows in particular that manual workers report never practicing sport more often than executives. Eurobarometer 472 documents an association between education level and overall frequency of practice, particularly the share reporting never practicing; data on the nature of the employment contract require verification from this source. The expansion of sports facilities in these territories can encounter limits when lack of available time constitutes a major barrier to practice.

The French sport-health strategy 2025-2030 tackles this bias head-on by explicitly targeting audiences far from practice. But it remains in the supply register: medical prescription of physical activity, sports vouchers, sports mediation. Sport-health and physical activity promotion strategies address the workplace, though working time reduction is not systematically a central measure, which falls under other ministries and political agendas.

Results from four-day week trials

This is where a set of recent experiments shifts the reasoning. In Iceland, the government conducted two massive working time reduction trials between 2015 and 2019: 2,500 public sector employees moved to 35 or 36 hours per week without salary reduction. In Denmark, similar initiatives were tested. Results on productivity were widely commented on. Less often cited: the data on physical activity.

The Icelandic trial report documents reduced hours and well-being; the report documents reduced hours and well-being without establishing a measured increase in participation in regular physical activity. The evaluators note more time for family, household tasks, leisure, or rest, and indicate that some participants reported exercising more. Sport ranks third, but it progresses. The report does not allow establishing a progression in sports activity attributable to working time reduction alone, nor affirming that it occurred without equipment or campaign.

These trials aimed to evaluate the effects of working time reduction on well-being and productivity; data on physical activity remain limited. This effect is neither universal nor automatic, and supposes other favorable conditions. The available observations merit that public health decision-makers take greater interest in them. Lack of time is cited by 40% of all respondents as a barrier to more regular practice, and by 37% of those who never practice sport. A time organization policy deserves to be compared to other forms of public health investment.

The answer is not obvious. It depends on the national context, the type of employment, the intensity of the working time reduction. But the question itself is rarely asked in parliaments that vote on budgets for sports and health.

The objection of economic efficiency

A competing reading exists, notably advanced by liberal economic analyses applied to labor markets. Its central argument: the four-day week, if it reduces productive time, weighs on company competitiveness and, in the long term, on available income that itself finances health and sports spending. Daan Roggeveen and other labor economists have documented that productivity gains observed in the trials are real, but not universal: they are concentrated in jobs with high cognitive intensity and little transferable to sectors with constrained work rates.

This objection is serious. A worker in food processing or logistics cannot reduce working time without reducing production. The four-day week, in its simplest version, reproduces in reverse the inequality it claims to correct: it benefits first the executives and knowledge workers, those who already practice the most.

This objection clarifies the conditions for applying the thesis without invalidating it. Working time policies most relevant to public health are probably targeted forms: annualized time with protected periods, paid active break entitlements, schedule adjustments for parents. Time constitutes a recognized determinant of physical health, little integrated into public dashboards, and the generalized four-day week is only one modality among others. This is exactly the criticism Coyle directs at inherited indicators: they render invisible the non-market inputs that condition real well-being.

On this point, the two readings converge more than they oppose. A liberal economist who rigorously measures the costs of sedentary behavior—absences from work, burden on health systems, long-term productivity loss—obtains a solid argument for investing in work time organization policies. Public debt consumes the space reserved for health, education, and climate: once budget constrained, high-yield policies merit precise identification. Working time gains could favor regular physical activity, whose health benefits would justify public investment compared to that of treatments and hospitalizations linked to sedentary behavior.

The blind spots of current indicators

Diane Coyle, in The Measure of Progress, formulates a diagnosis that sports economics illustrates well. National accounting systems were constructed to measure industrial production. They capture sports facilities built, subsidies paid to associations, organized events. They do not capture the minutes of physical activity practiced by a household that, lacking time, never frequented these facilities.

This invisibility has direct political consequences. A sports minister who presents his record shows the number of facilities renovated, clubs subsidized, participants in labeled events. He does not show the curve of sedentary behavior in his constituency. The first indicator is in his hand; the second depends on a determinant, work time organization, that falls under another ministry, another negotiation, another political agenda.

The European Week of Sport illustrates this blind spot with particular acuity. It mobilizes real energy, brings together valuable associative actors, creates punctual habits that can transform into lasting practices for a fraction of participants. But its success indicator, the number of participants, is exactly the visible output Coyle criticizes. If the 2026 edition displays 16 million participants and the sedentary rate remains stable, the current evaluation system will say the policy worked.

Refounding this indicator would suppose tracking the same people after their participation in the Week of Sport, noting their frequency of practice and their employment conditions. This follow-up data exists in certain academic studies, rarely in European institutional dashboards.

Toward 2035: When the barrier remains organizational

If the primary barrier to physical activity is available time and if sports policies continue to ignore this determinant, European public health in 2035 will bear the cost of this blind spot.

The WHO sets for 2030 an objective of 15% relative reduction in the prevalence of physical inactivity among adults and adolescents. Intermediate evaluations indicate that sports supply policies alone will not suffice. Some member states have understood this and are experimenting. Finnish regulation provides for breaks and rest; active breaks fall under workplace health recommendations, not a regulatory obligation for sedentary jobs. The Netherlands are testing sectoral agreements that include periods of active mobility in working time.

These experiments follow a logic close to that of the Icelandic and Danish trials: treating available time as a public health policy variable, and not as a simple consequence of labor market power dynamics. If they generalize, a plausible scenario at the 2030-2035 horizon is a bifurcation between two groups of states. States integrating work time organization into their sport-health strategies could progress toward the WHO objective. States continuing to accumulate events and facilities without acting on time determinants risk maintaining policies whose public health yield remains little visible.

The French sport-health strategy 2025-2030, which articulates medical prescription, sport-on-prescription, and sports mediation, constitutes a real advance on the medical dimension. It remains incomplete on the temporal dimension. The true measure of its ambition will be knowing whether, in five years, it will have produced longitudinal data on effective practice among targeted audiences, and not merely a count of prescriptions issued.

Research: France exports its talent and imports its lag: the link between work organization and long-term human productivity crosses several public policies. The physical health of workers conditions their long-term productivity and merits a place in the analysis of economic policies. Countries that treat regular physical activity as an output of economic policy as much as health policy will have a structural advantage that current national accounts do not yet see.

The signal to follow might be there. Not in the participation figures for the Week of Sport, which will continue to progress mechanically at the pace of the program’s geographic expansion. But in the six-month evaluations of working time trials, in health insurance fund data on sedentary-related pathologies by socioprofessional category, and in the decision by a few labor ministries to integrate physical activity into their sectoral negotiations. That would be a change of indicator, in the precise sense Coyle means it: measuring what matters, rather than counting what can be measured.

Sources

  1. European Commission, European Week of Sport 2024: https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/get-moving-2024-european-week-sport-2024-09-23_en
  2. Eurobarometer 472, Sport and Physical Activity (2024), European Commission
  3. Diane Coyle, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters, Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179025/the-measure-of-progress
  4. Evaluation Report on Working Time Reduction Trials in Iceland (2015-2019), Alda, Association for Sustainable Democracy & Autonomy Iceland / Trades Union Congress
  5. WHO, Global Recommendations on Physical Activity for Health (2020 update, 2025 guidance)
  6. National Sport-Health Strategy 2025-2030, Ministry of Sports (France)