Watching your community play sport makes you less lonely. The NHS just needs a way to find it.

Over 3.9 million people in Great Britain — 7% of the population — report feeling lonely often or always, and the figure continues to rise (ONS, 2025). The NHS has built an entire workforce to respond to this. Social prescribing link workers now exist across England specifically to connect people experiencing loneliness, anxiety, or isolation to non-clinical, community-based support — and government plans are to grow that workforce to 9,000 link workers by 2036/37 to ensure more people are connected to opportunities for physical activity (National Academy for Social Prescribing, 2026).

This is a genuinely good system, built around a genuinely good idea: that a GP referral does not always need to end in a prescription. Sometimes what someone needs is a walking group, a choir, a gardening club, or a women's football team two streets away.

The system has a structural problem that nobody set out to create and almost nobody is talking about. Link workers can only refer people into community activities they know exist. And in women's grassroots sport specifically, almost none of it is visible to them at all.

A system that works, built on a gap nobody has filled

The evidence for social prescribing's impact on physical activity is genuinely strong. Evaluations consistently report that interaction with a link worker leads to increases in participants' physical activity levels, and where healthcare attendance data has been examined, social prescribing referrals have been associated with measurable reductions in use of hospital resources, including emergency care (Iriss, 2020). Representation from patients living in the most deprived areas referred through social prescribing increased from 22% before the national roll-out to 42% in 2023 — meaning this system is already reaching exactly the communities where grassroots women's sport tends to be most present and most needed (Quinn, 2025).

But the same evidence base contains an uncomfortable admission. Although there is a wide range of community-based physical activity opportunities for link workers to refer to, currently very little is known about the extent to which this is actually happening in practice (Sheffield Hallam University, 2021). The opportunities may exist. Whether the system can find them, verify them, and confidently send someone there is a different question entirely — and the honest answer, for grassroots women's sport, is mostly not yet.

What a link worker is actually working with

A social prescribing link worker spends time understanding what matters to someone, then tailors a package of community-based support around it (Sheffield Hallam University, 2021). That sounds personal and responsive, and it is — right up until the moment the link worker tries to find something specific to refer that person to.

Picture a woman referred by her GP for low mood and isolation following a relevant life change — a divorce, children leaving home, retirement. The link worker knows that physical activity and community connection both help. They know, in theory, that there may be a women's netball team or walking football group nearby. What they do not have is a reliable, current, verified way to find it, confirm it is still running, confirm it is welcoming to a complete beginner in her fifties, or confirm anyone will actually be there this Tuesday.

So the referral defaults to whatever is already known, structured, and easy to point to — a leisure centre class, a walking group with an established relationship to the NHS, a national campaign. The grassroots women's rugby club training four streets away, run entirely by volunteers, with no website beyond a Facebook page nobody has posted to since March, simply never enters the conversation. Not because it would not be a perfect fit. Because it is invisible to the one person whose job is to make that connection.

This is the gap Nettie exists to close

Nettie makes grassroots women's sport discoverable and verifiable, in one place, for the first time. A link worker searching by postcode can see every women's football, rugby, netball and cricket club within walking distance, with verified attendance data showing the club is genuinely active — not a Facebook group that quietly died two years ago, but a real, running, weekly fixture that people are showing up to right now.

That verification matters more than it might first appear. A link worker is not just looking for an activity. They are making a recommendation they need to feel confident in, often to someone who is anxious, isolated, and unlikely to try a second time if the first suggestion turns out to be a dead end. Verified, current attendance data turns a hopeful guess into a confident referral.

And the connection Nettie builds runs in both directions. The same QR check-in that gives a club its first verified attendance data also means that when the NHS does refer someone in, that referral itself becomes part of the evidence — a data point that shows social prescribing pathways into grassroots women's sport are working, building the case for deeper NHS and ICB partnership over time.

Why sport specifically, and why women's sport

Social prescribing was never meant to be only about gardening and art groups, valuable as those are. Physical activity sits at the centre of it, precisely because moving the body and connecting with other people in the same place, at the same time, doing the same thing, achieves both of social prescribing's core aims simultaneously — health and belonging, in one weekly fixture.

And this works even for people who never play. Research analysing data from over 7,000 UK adults found that simply attending live sporting events — standing on the touchline, being part of a crowd, showing up to watch — independently predicted improved wellbeing and reduced loneliness, regardless of demographic background (Keyes et al., 2023). A link worker does not need to find someone a team to join. Sending someone to watch their local women's team play, to stand among the same faces every Saturday, to feel part of something happening near them, may be enough on its own.

Grassroots women's sport in particular is an almost perfectly designed social prescribing resource that the system has not yet learned to use. It is typically free or very low cost. It is hyperlocal by definition — a club exists in a specific place, played by people who live nearby. It is recurring and reliable, week after week, season after season. And it is led by and made up of women, which matters enormously for women being referred who may feel safer, more able to attend, and more likely to stay, in a space that already reflects them.

None of that needs to be built. It already exists, in every community in England, every single weekend. The only piece missing is the bridge between the system trying to make 9,000 confident referrals a year and the thousands of grassroots women's clubs perfectly placed to receive them.

That bridge is visibility. That is what Nettie is building.