More sports fields = more sports?

Quick one - Gordon Brown thinks that if there are more opportunities for children to play sports they'll play more sports, so he's spending £100 million on it.

Sure, if this was a supply-side problem. It's not. School sports facilities aren't in constant use. Facilities are not where the crunch is. Sport competes for attention now not just with Eastenders but with Wii and MySpace and Pandora and IM and YouTube and BitTorrent. There's a lot more potential substitute distractions - creating more opportunities to choose one of them that isn't even in short supply won't conjure up additional demand. A bit of thought about where the demand might be would be more valuable (and if I had to guess what would get kids to exercise more I'd start by putting paintball on the national curriculum and funding schools to provide it.)