The European Commission published a special Eurobarometer survey on sport and physical activity in 2010. EHFA's news item recorded the publication date as 29 March 2010 and carried the survey in the association's news channel that October.
Eurobarometer is the Commission's instrument for measuring opinion across the member states, and a survey devoted to sport and physical activity produced something the sector had not previously had: figures on how Europeans exercised, collected by the Commission rather than by the industry itself. Public authorities act on figures of that kind, and for a sector arguing that physical inactivity was a public health problem it was helping to address, a Commission survey was worth more than any number the industry could publish about its own members.
The association used the survey alongside its own evidence work. It arrived while the association was gathering that evidence, and having two accounts of the same picture, one from the Commission and one from the sector, was useful when the case was put to officials. The European guidelines on physical activity gave the sector a target to aim at, the Becoming the Hub project reviewed the evidence for the sector's role in meeting it, and the association's European affairs work carried the result to Brussels.