The global health challenges of the twenty-first century call for greater upstream, preventative action. To truly tackle major population health issues, such as obesity, the aging population and the spread of HIV, we need innovative ways to bring public health into the mainstream and effectively engage people with health messages and health interventions in their everyday lives. Bringing the worlds of sport and public health together is one such innovative approach, offering a wide range of opportunities to make population health interventions more accessible—whether that population is the football fans of a whole nation or a small community of people with a shared health need.

In this book we’ve looked at the well-evidenced benefits to physical and mental well-being of sports participation, we’ve discussed the myriad opportunities to work with sports partners and we’ve seen the variety of sports-based health interventions being undertaken across the spectrum of public health work. We’ve also discussed the unhealthy aspects of sport and the challenges and potential pitfalls of bringing the worlds of sport and public health together. Although certainly not a panacea for the world’s public health problems, sport’s huge popularity, breadth of reach and increasing accessibility give it powerful potential as a vehicle for targeting and engaging populations with health interventions.

While a whole host of interventions around the world are aimed at engaging people in sport for the primary purpose of increasing levels of physical activity , what we have showcased in this book are examples of sports-based interventions with wider public health aims. Many of these interventions have involved participation in sports activities (although never simply as an end in itself), while some have used sport as a theme for communicating health messages, and others have used sports venues and events as settings in which to deliver health interventions to a captive audience. Although sport-based interventions may not seem an obvious choice when seeking to increase vaccination uptake or respond to a natural disaster or terrorist atrocity, for example, the concepts which underpin such projects reflect familiar staples of public health theory , such as social marketing and the settings approach.

The use of sports-based interventions in public health work, other than simply as a means to increase physical exercise, however, is very much an emerging field. Evidence for the impact and cost-effectiveness of such interventions in achieving public health outcomes is currently limited and much of the work is experimental. There is a pressing need to grow the evidence base so that cost-effective interventions can be championed and potential funders and commissioners can have confidence that investment in rolling out these interventions will lead to improvements in public health outcomes. It is just as important that we understand what kinds of sport-based interventions aren’t cost-effective, or in what contexts an intervention might be successful while in others it might be ineffective. Building a strong evidence base for public health interventions is always a challenge, however, particularly in emerging niche fields characterised by scattered, often small scale, projects of widely varied history, design, objectives and resources. Certainly, there is considerable variation in the extent and rigour of formal performance monitoring or evaluation accompanying the interventions featured in this book. These case studies are not intended as flawless illustrations of ‘best practice’, however, but rather have been chosen to reflect the variety of work being undertaken across the globe and the current state-of-the-art in the field.

As we set out in the Preface, our ultimate purpose in bringing these chapters together is to inspire further developments in the sport and health field by showing the exciting range of projects which have already been realised. To conclude this book, we’re therefore going to focus on taking the reader through two practical overarching key messages which we believe will be crucial for the next generation of sport-based health interventions seeking to secure their place as a staple of mainstream public health work: firstly, use the evidence base and build the evidence base and secondly, acknowledge the challenges and take a critical approach.