One regular participant in eight trains less because the others are not available

The national sports participation barometer published on 17 December 2025 by INJEP and CRÉDOC, conducted among 4,010 people in early July 2025, establishes that sixty-one per cent of French people take part in regular physical activity. In that same survey, twelve per cent of regular participants say they would do more if their activity did not involve other people who are not always available. It is not the leading barrier. It is, however, the only one nobody has tried to solve.

How many people in France play sport today?

Sixty-one per cent regular participation is two points up on 2023 and seven points up on 2018. Over twelve months, seventy-two per cent of French people report at least one physical or sporting activity, and eighty-one per cent if active travel such as cycling and utility walking is counted.

The striking finding in this edition is the restored parity between women and men: sixty-one per cent against sixty-two, a single point apart, where six points separated them in 2018. The divide that remains is educational and social, with seventy per cent of regular participants among those holding the baccalauréat or above, against fifty-two per cent below it.

The same movement shows up in licences. France counted 17.2 million sports licences in 2024, spread across a hundred and twenty federations, up 3.8 per cent in a year and 5.3 per cent on 2019. Women hold 38.9 per cent of them, or 6.66 million. Football accounts for 2,352,000, tennis 1,169,000, basketball 615,771, handball 591,324, rugby 424,300 and badminton around 210,000.

Why do people stop playing sport when they still want to?

In the ranking of reasons why regular participants do not do more, professional, educational and family constraints come far ahead at fifty per cent. Then come cost at twenty-one per cent, unsuitable timetables at seventeen per cent, and, level at twelve per cent, overcrowded venues and the availability of the other people the activity involves.

Twelve per cent is one regular participant in eight. Set against a population where sixty-one per cent of adults take part regularly, that represents several million people who would do more if a partner were available at the right moment.

Among non-participants and occasional participants, the same survey finds that eight per cent do not take part because they do not know anyone to do it with. An earlier INJEP study, published in November 2021 from a base of twelve thousand individuals, put that proportion at fourteen per cent. The gap between the two owes something to wording and sampling, and invites you to keep an order of magnitude rather than a value.

It is worth stating plainly what does not exist: there is no French public statistic of the kind “X per cent of French people give up sport for lack of a partner”. If you come across a sentence like that anywhere, it was invented. That absence is itself informative, because it flags a subject the statistical apparatus has never treated in its own right.

How many people train alone?

The same barometer reports that fifty per cent of French people take part mainly alone, a proportion almost identical to the forty-nine per cent recorded in 2018. It is the most stable figure in the whole survey.

Over the same period, the share of people taking part within a club or association fell from twenty-four per cent in 2018 to twenty per cent in 2025. The Sport Santé barometer run by the FFEPGV with Ipsos among two thousand people in late 2024 confirms the general direction: sixty per cent of participants favour individual activities, thirty-one per cent team sports.

The overall picture is of a country that takes part more and more, is supervised less and less, and does so mostly alone. What has disappeared is not the desire to take part with others. It is the institution that used to organise that meeting by default.

What does a sports partner really change?

Sorting is needed here, because the subject is saturated with appealing and unverified claims.

Social comparison, meaning the act of placing yourself relative to others, was assessed by a meta-analysis published in 2025 in Nature Human Behaviour covering seventy-nine randomised controlled trials and more than 1.3 million participants. It finds a real but modest short-term effect, which fades further in the long run, with evidence quality judged low to moderate.

The Köhler effect, the phenomenon whereby the weaker member of a pair produces greater effort when the joint performance depends on them, was the subject of a preregistered meta-analysis in 2023 covering nineteen studies and 1,912 participants. The performance gain in a pair is significant there. Be careful about what that measures, though: short laboratory tasks, often with virtual partners. It is the intensity of one session, not adherence over six months.

A daily diary study run over fourteen days among ninety-five young adults in relationships shows that days spent exercising with your partner come with higher positive affect and higher relationship satisfaction. It finds no effect at all on total exercise volume.

An American study from the 1990s is often quoted, reporting twelve-month dropout of 6.3 per cent among people who signed up as a couple against 43.0 per cent among those who signed up alone. The contrast is spectacular, but it rests on sixty-two people, in a single gym, with no randomisation and no replication since. On its own it proves nothing.

What does a sports partner not change?

The meta-analysis published in April 2026 in Nature Human Behaviour, the largest on the subject, is clear on one point: at the scale of physical activity promotion programmes, the group format does not produce more physical activity than the individual format. It compares interventions rather than ordinary lives, and it says nothing about pairs in particular. But it is enough to disqualify the most common promise.

It should be added that no meta-analysis to date isolates what is often called mutual accountability, the idea that you keep going because you promised someone. That is a solid and widely shared intuition, and it is not an established fact.

The honest argument, then, is not that you will keep going better with a partner. It is that you will enjoy it more, that the session will be better, that the relationship will come out stronger, and that in some sports you simply cannot play without one.

Which sports require more than one player?

Padel is played by four, and the international rules provide for no other format. So is tennis doubles, so is badminton doubles, and table tennis takes at least two. In those disciplines a partner is not a nice extra, it is a condition for the session to exist at all.

The market understood this before the statisticians did. Playtomic, which claims four million users, more than 6,700 clubs and sixty-six countries, reports that more than twenty per cent of bookings in the United Kingdom now go through open matches, where you sign up alone and the game fills itself with people you do not know, and cites more than ten thousand open matches in the United States in 2025 alone. No equivalent data has been published for France.

The social context does not make the question any less pressing. The Fondation de France Solitudes survey, conducted in July 2025 among three thousand people, records eleven per cent in situations of relational isolation and twenty-four per cent of French people saying they regularly feel lonely, with rates rising to thirty-seven per cent among the under-twenty-fives and thirty-six per cent among those aged twenty-five to thirty-nine.

How do you find a sports partner near you?

Start with the slot, not the person. The number one constraint on sport in France is available time, at fifty per cent of responses, far ahead of everything else. An ideal partner who can never make Tuesday evening is of no use to you.

Be explicit about your level in the first message. A level mismatch is what kills a new sporting relationship, because it bores one person and discourages the other. Writing “beginner, sustained rallies, no competition” will get you fewer replies and a great many more sessions.

Aim at the session, not the season. Fifty per cent of French people take part alone and only twenty per cent within a club: the format that actually matches current habits is the repeated one-off appointment, not the annual commitment.

And if the person is what is missing, that is where Smatchy comes in: putting you in touch with people at your level and in your area, for Thursday evening, with no club to join and no subscription to sign.