Open Data for Sport Governance

Background Recent failures in the administration of sports organisations have led individuals and institutions in the field of sport to become increasingly concerned with questions of appropriate forms of governance. According to different academics and practitioners, the application of governance in the sport context should raise awareness of how sport organisations and systems are directed and controlled. Objectives The project aimed to create a governance and management software tool to analyse, compare and assist European sport organisations (ESO) to help them to be managed in a more efficient and transparent way. The project tackles five gaps identified by ESO managers and the European Commission: practical tool, objective indicators, integrated model, transparency and Open Data, and Risk Management. Implementation The project involved more than 500 sport organisations (clubs and federations) from countries such as Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Malta. It also involved governmental organisations and experts from the sport field who acted as loudspeakers for the dissemination of the project. In this way, we also hope that the tool can become a source of information to help sports organizations in defining their short-, medium- and long-term goals. Achievements The IT Tool, which is available (https://bit.ly/m/OD4SG), is a fundamental outcome of our work and we believe it will be helpful in developing sports organizations and improving their process. It allows the comparison of similar organisations, segmenting the comparison by country, sport or type of organisation in many different areas of their management practices such as governance, strategy, sport and events, marketing, human resources, procedures & IT, social responsibility, and finance.