Big4Sports

Project Description

Financing is a fundamental aspect for the development of sport and sporting organizations as highlighted in the EU Work Plan for Sport 2014-2017. Main sources of funding come from public organizations, though private companies and the sports industry are becoming more and more relevant in terms of sponsorship. In both cases good governance appears as a crucial condition to be fulfilled in order to manage external funding. Adopting new and innovative mechanisms of governance will have a direct and positive effect in the overall image of sport organizations and likely increase the sponsorship revenues and attractiveness of sport. BIG4SPORTS aims at connecting funding sources (public & private) with sports organizations to jointly develop new and innovative collaboration schemes in governance for sport. The main project objective is strengthening governance capacities of sport organizations as a result of their collaboration with public and private sponsors, achieving long-lasting cooperation between them.

More specifically, BIG4SPORTS seeks to:

1) Jointly develop an innovative collaborative scheme to effectively enforce governance principles in sport organizations, built on the principle of excellence
of public and private (corporate) governance standards; and

2) Implement and evaluate this scheme in order to deliver a solid and tested methodology transferable to the EU sporting community.

The partnership is made up of 9 organizations covering 9 EU Member States and bringing in a permanent dialogue forum the sports industry, public authorities, sporting organizations (5 multi-sport clubs which are the main beneficiaries of the new governance scheme) and academic partners contributing to the conceptualization of the new scheme. The project estimates an impact in the partnering 5 sports clubs and their around 19000 people (managers, staff, coaches, players, etc.) as well as in other 50 European clubs beyond the partnership adopting the BIG4SPORTS Scheme through online tools.