By its own count, EHFA represented more than 9,000 health and fitness facilities in 23 European countries in March 2010. The figure was the association's own, reported as the measure of how much of the European sector stood behind its standards work.
The count was not a marketing number. Representation was the base on which the rest of the association's programme rested. A qualifications framework is only as useful as the number of employers who recognise it, and a register only as useful as the number of facilities in which a registered professional can be employed. Every national association that joined, and every operator that came in, added facilities to the count and gave the standards another market in which they were used.
The figure also mattered in Brussels. The sector was fragmented across national markets with different training traditions and no common employer voice, and a body that could say it represented more than 9,000 facilities in 23 countries was making a different kind of argument from one that could only describe a problem. It was the number the association could put to officials and partner organisations in place of the estimate any one operator or national body could offer on its own. It reported the same footprint, more than 9,000 facilities in 23 countries, to its members at the end of 2010. See membership and national associations.