The EU Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027 – Resetting Education and Training for the Digital Age – sustains an integrated approach for the use of technology in education and the improvement of digital skills, with an extended scope, beyond formal education, and including lifelong learning. High quality and inclusive digital education constitute strategic objectives, to be pursued throughout education and training.

As also underlined, transforming education for the digital age is a task for the whole of society, ensuring equality, accessibility, and inclusiveness for all citizens. Connectivity, access to know-how and equipment, organizational capacity, and skills are vital and, to achieve such goals, teachers and trainers need to be competent and confident users of technology.

Digital education is a strategic priority for a ‘Europe fit for the digital age, particularly important in the context of the Recovery and Resilience Plans of European member states.

It was within this framework that DIGI-SPORTING, an EU Erasmus+ Sports Collaborative Partnership, funded by the EU, assembling organizations from different fields and 8 European countries, challenged itself to contribute with concrete data and instruments. A common understanding of the value of sports, a thoughtful spirit of cooperation, and systematic work completed the setting, delivering to the sports universe a set of concrete tools, freely accessible (at www.digi-sporting.eu).

Sports is arguably one of the most powerful policy tools to pursue social, economic, or human welfare. Pierre de Coubertin and Nelson Mandela might have revealed that with the brightest simplicity and most impressive examples. Still, its full strength and benefits for human society at large are only being partially grasped.

Numerous and growing examples in Europe and from around the world, show us how the sport is a unique and remarkable tool for social cohesion and community pacification, urban regeneration, environmental sustainability and mobility, empowerment of girls and women, to improve individual and collective health, self-fulfillment, and individual well-being.

Physical exercise is, moreover, in its competitive expression, or sports, a school of virtues: it teaches respect for adversaries; disciplines the momentum and promotes loyalty; develops solidarity, the value of persistence, and the desire to overcome; educates for defeat without discouragement and victory without boasting.