Connection First. Not Intervention.

I have spent twelve years working in NHS roles across clinical, innovation, health tech uptake and commissioning. I also play rugby at Championship 2 level. And for twelve years I watched two completely different worlds try to solve the same problem with completely different tools — and neither quite reaching the answer that was sitting right in front of them.

The problem is connection. The growing disconnection of people from their communities, from physical activity, from each other. The loneliness epidemic. The physical inactivity crisis. The persistent gap between the health outcomes we want for people and the interventions we design to achieve them.

Both worlds — public health and grassroots sport — know that community connection is the answer. The research is unambiguous. Watching sports events nurtures a sense of community belonging and collective cohesion, with shared experiences cultivating trust and wellbeing among individuals (Guo, Yang and Zhang, 2024). Sport participation significantly enhances social networks, community cohesion, and fosters a sense of belonging and empowerment (Karstensen et al., 2024). Social identification with sport teams boosts fans' social wellbeing by giving them access to meaningful relationships (University of Illinois, 2023).

The sector knows this. The data is there. And yet the way it responds to it consistently does the same limiting thing: it looks in the wrong places.

What social prescribing actually prescribes

Social prescribing is one of the most genuinely promising ideas in modern public health. Connect people to community activities as an alternative or complement to clinical intervention. Reduce GP burden. Improve population health. Tackle isolation at its source rather than its symptoms.

But here is what social prescribing link workers currently refer people to: walking groups. Gardening clubs. Art classes. Choir. Cooking sessions. Befriending services. Gentle exercise classes. Community cafés.

These are valuable activities. They serve a real purpose. But they share a common characteristic: they are low-intensity, low-commitment, and designed to feel safe and non-threatening. They are chosen because they are easy to commission, easy to list, and unlikely to feel intimidating to someone who is already struggling.

What social prescribing does not refer people to: watching a women's grassroots rugby match. Attending a women's football fixture. Showing up at a women's cricket club on a Saturday afternoon. Going to watch the local netball team.

Not because link workers would not want to. But because these activities do not appear on their lists. They are not listed, not registered, not discoverable through the tools link workers have. They exist in a completely separate world that the social prescribing infrastructure has never connected to.

Grassroots women's sport is doing the most powerful community health work in England. Social prescribing has never heard of most of it.

Why this matters — the evidence for what sport actually does

The community health impact of grassroots sport spectating is not theoretical. Research published in 2024 found that watching sports events empowers people's sense of wellbeing through social interaction and emotional experience, with the shared experience of attending sport cultivating trust and collective cohesion within communities (Guo, Yang and Zhang, 2024). A systematic review found that team sport participation was associated with better mental health outcomes than individual sport, with social and community aspects as important as the physical health benefits (Eather et al., 2023).

Crucially, research on social prescribing and loneliness found that genuine community belonging — not the referral that led someone there, but the belonging they experienced when they arrived — was the mechanism that created the positive health shift (Hayes et al., 2024). The belonging is the intervention. And belonging requires a community that already exists, already has identity, already has momentum.

A walking group that was assembled for the purpose of helping isolated people feel less isolated is fundamentally different from a women's rugby club that has been playing together for ten years, has a loyal crowd that shows up every week, and has a shared identity that newcomers can join. The first is a health programme. The second is a community. And communities create belonging in a way that health programmes cannot replicate.

The framing problem

There is a second issue beyond discoverability. Even when social prescribing does connect people to sport-adjacent activities, the framing of the referral works against the outcome it is trying to create.

When someone arrives at an activity knowing they were sent there by their GP because something is wrong with them, they carry that identity into the experience. Studies using the COM-B model of behaviour change found that psychological barriers, including stigma and anxiety, were among the most significant barriers to sustained engagement with social prescribing activities (Sadio et al., 2025). Research identified that self-stigma and anticipated stigma consistently obstructed participation even when people wanted to engage (Pyszora et al., 2021).

The referral framing — however well-intentioned — reinforces a deficit identity before the person has walked through the door. They are not a fan. They are not a supporter. They are a patient in a different building.

Genuine community belonging requires the opposite of this. It requires the person to arrive with an identity they chose — supporter, community member, someone whose presence matters — rather than one that was assigned to them by the health system.

What Nettie changes

Nettie solves both problems simultaneously. The discoverability problem and the framing problem.

On discoverability: Nettie creates a searchable, verified, real-time directory of active grassroots women's clubs. A link worker can search by postcode and sport and find a women's football club two miles from their patient, see that forty-seven people attended last Saturday, see that they have been coming every week for ten weeks, and make a referral with genuine confidence that the club is real, active, and attended by a real community. That social proof — the verified evidence of an existing, consistent community — is one of the most reliable motivational triggers in behavioural science (Cialdini, 2009).

On framing: the Nettie fan-facing experience contains no health language whatsoever. No mention of social prescribing. No mention of inactivity or isolation. No clinical framing of any kind. The person arrives at the ground, sees a QR banner at the gate, scans in in ten seconds, and the club earns 50p. They are fan number forty-eight. That is their identity. Contributor. Supporter. Someone whose presence made a difference.

That identity — chosen, active, contributing — is the foundation on which genuine community belonging develops. Research on sport and community belonging found that participation among newcomers improves psychological sense of community and subjective wellbeing, with the social relationships formed through sport mediating the relationship between participation and wellbeing outcomes (Corvino et al., 2022).

The health outcome happens. The physical activity, the social connection, the community belonging. But it happens as a consequence of a positive choice, not as the stated purpose of an intervention.

A different kind of referral

Imagine what a Nettie-enabled social prescribing referral looks like compared to the current model.

Current model: a link worker searches an incomplete database of registered activities, finds a walking group or art class, suggests it to a patient, the patient may or may not go, there is no verified outcome.

Nettie model: a link worker opens Nettie, searches by postcode, finds a verified active women's rugby club nearby with forty-seven consistent attendees, sends the patient a link to the next fixture, the patient arrives as fan forty-eight, scans in at the gate, the club earns, the link worker sees a verified check-in. The outcome is confirmed. The patient never knew they were being referred to a health intervention. They went to the rugby.

Every step is better. The information is real. The referral is an introduction to a community, not a direction to a service. The outcome is verifiable. And the experience for the person is of choosing to do something, not of complying with something.

What I am asking the sector to consider

Social prescribing link workers are doing extraordinarily valuable work with the tools they have. This is not a criticism of them or of the social prescribing model. It is an observation that the tools available to them have never included the most powerful community health infrastructure in England: the grassroots women's sport clubs that meet every weekend, in every community, generating exactly the belonging that social prescribing is trying to create.

Nettie makes those clubs findable. It makes their community verifiable. It makes their health impact fundable. And it does all of that without asking the fan to be anything other than someone who chose to show up on a Saturday afternoon.

The most effective social prescribing referral is one the person never experiences as a referral. Nettie makes that possible for the first time.

The connection was always there. We just needed to make it count.

If you work in social prescribing, public health, sport development, or community investment — and you think there is a conversation worth having here — I would love to talk.

Nic Vovk Founder, Nettie nettie.online