There is a moment every junior coach learns to recognise. The drill is running, the confident players are loud, and somewhere near the back is the child who has already decided not to be seen. They tie a shoe a beat too slowly. They drift to the edge of the group. They are waiting, quietly, to be left out, because somewhere along the way they learned that this is what sport is for them.
I have played competitive basketball for thirteen years, and for the last few years, I have been an assistant coach for junior teams at my school in Bucharest, the first in Romania built on Finnish educational principles, where I have studied since kindergarten. I also sit on the Children’s Board of Romania, supported by UNICEF, where we work on mental health and children’s rights. I mention this not to list credentials, but because both sides of that experience, the court and the committee room, keep leading me to the same conclusion. Europe is sitting on one of the most powerful tools it has for adolescent mental health and belonging, and for millions of young people, it leaves that tool on the bench.
We tend to talk about sport in two registers. There is elite sport, with its medals, transfers and national pride, and there is leisure, something you do if you happen to have the time, money and confidence for it. What falls between those two stories is the thing that matters most at fifteen: sport as a place to belong, to manage stress, to fail safely and be caught by a team anyway.
The evidence that this matters is not soft. The World Health Organization’s European region has warned for years that mental-health conditions are among the leading causes of illness and disability among adolescents, and that regular physical activity is one of the most reliable protective factors we have for young minds. The Council of Europe built its European Sports Charter around a simple, almost radical idea: sport for all. Not sport for the gifted, the wealthy, or the already-confident, but for all. The principle is written into European policy, but the problem is that, on the ground, we keep building systems that quietly contradict it.
Why does sport work? Not by magic. A training session is a fixed appointment in a chaotic week, a small dose of mastery, and twenty minutes in which the body outruns the worries. It is a social connection that does not first require you to be articulate about your feelings. For an adolescent still learning to regulate stress, that combination is close to medicine. And yet the WHO estimates that the large majority of adolescents worldwide fall short of the activity it recommends for their age, a gap Europe mirrors, and one that falls hardest on exactly the children who can least afford to miss out.
I have watched the contradiction happen. Selection starts early and turns ruthless fast. Children are cut at ages when being cut feels like a verdict on their worth. The ones who leave first are rarely the least talented; they are the ones who could not afford the fees, whose parents could not drive them across the city, who were already anxious and read every missed pass as proof that they did not belong. The young people who most need what sport offers, structure, belonging, a healthy way to fail, are precisely the ones our systems push out first. We have made access to wellbeing a prize for performance.
It does not have to be this way, and the proof is already inside Europe. The Nordic approach to sport for all, which shaped the school I grew up in, starts from a different question. Not who is the best, but how do we keep everyone playing for as long as possible. Broad participation, late specialisation, low cost, and the assumption that a child’s right to play does not depend on their usefulness to a results sheet. This is not charity. It is better design, and over time it produces both healthier young people and stronger athletes.
Belonging is the part we underestimate most. For a teenager who has just moved countries, and Europe is full of them, the children of migrants, of expats, of families chasing work across borders, a team is integration in its most honest form. You do not need fluent language to set a screen. You do not need the right passport to pass the ball. Through an Erasmus+ project on mental-health interventions in schools, I saw how quickly a shared activity does what speeches about European values rarely manage: it turns a stranger into a teammate. That is European unity at the scale where it is actually built, not in Strasbourg, but on a Tuesday evening court in a town nobody writes about.
So what would it look like to take this seriously? A few things, each grounded in what already works.
First, reorganise school and municipal sport around participation and wellbeing, not only medals. The Council of Europe’s own framework points this way; we should fund it that way too, tying public and Erasmus+ Sport money to how many young people a programme keeps, not only how many it crowns.
Second, treat coaches as the first responders for adolescent mental health, since they already are. A coach often spends more unstructured time with a teenager than any teacher. Light-touch mental-health literacy, knowing how to notice a struggling young person and where to send them, costs little and changes outcomes.
Third, stop pushing out the children who need it most. No early cuts at the youth level, guaranteed playing minutes, fee waivers that are normal rather than humiliating. The measure of a youth programme should be how few children it loses, not how many trophies it wins.
Fourth, put young people in the rooms where this is decided. I sit on advisory bodies in Romania, and I can tell you that adults routinely design, fund and photograph themselves in front of youth sport without asking the people inside it. Youth voice is not a decoration. We are the ones who can see the gap between the brochure and the bench.
None of this is utopia as every piece of it already exists somewhere in Europe. The task is not invention but circulation: moving what works in one corner of the continent to the places still treating sport as a luxury or a contest.
I am seventeen. I know how a locker room sounds when a teammate is quietly falling apart, and I know how it feels to be the one nobody is sure they want on the team. A bench is a small thing, until you are the one sitting on it. Europe already has the right principle written down; we just have to start coaching as though we mean it.