Bouncing back or staying inactive? The social inequality in sport participation before, during and after the COVID-pandemic

This contribution addresses the development of educational and financial inequality in sport participation in the Netherlands over the course of the COVID-pandemic. More specifically, we deal with the issue whether increased educational and financial inequality during the COVID-pandemic is temporary or becomes permanent after relaxation of the COVID-measures. We expected lower educated and people with financial problems to have less resources to bounce back to sport participation or to continue sport participation in sport over the course of the COVID-pandemic. To test our expectations, we performed multinominal logistic regression analyses on longitudinal data from the Dutch LISS-panel (n = 1.157). Our results confirmed that higher educated more often bounced back in their sport participation after COVID. Lower educated and people with financial problems were more likely to completely dropout. Our main conclusion is that educational and financial inequality in sport participation further increased after relaxation of the COVID-measures. This study enhances the understanding of the long-term impact of the COVID-pandemic on inequality in sport participation, and that might lead to more intensified sport promotion policies. Ongoing attention of policymakers for vulnerable groups is required to tackle social inequality in sport participation enlarged by the COVID-pandemic.