Playing community sport may come back, but will the volunteers?

(with Rochelle Eime)

Community sport has been devastatingly affected by the COVID-19 lockdown and recovery will take time.  The Government has responded to widespread concern about getting kids back to sport with a range of initiatives, including a $45.2 million sport voucher program that gives families $200 to help with costs.

Maintaining physically-active communities and the importance of playing sport for people of all ages has been recognised as more important than ever since the pandemic hit.

But with an almost singular focus on supporting participants and subsidising the cost of getting them back to their activities, we have forgotten one of the most important groups of people who deliver community sport: the volunteers.

Without volunteers, there is no return to play. While there has been significant focus on the pandemic’s effect on paid employment and income, little attention has been paid to how it has impacted unpaid community activities like volunteer work, which is valued at around $46 billion to the Australian economy.

Not only do players gain physical, social and mental health benefits from participating in community sport. Studies show volunteering positively impacts the wellbeing of volunteers by providing a sense of belonging, meaning, inclusion and satisfaction, as well as social interaction.

Similar to the lower rates of player participation due to COVID-19, volunteering in sport has also shown a significant and much overlooked decline.

As we emerge from widespread disruption to community sport, the challenge will be not only to simply bring back the volunteers who train players, run canteens, or score at games, but also to consider how to support them in a more complex and demanding future environment.

This challenge is intensified by cost-cutting at higher levels. Job cuts at organisations such as Cricket Australia directly affect the large community club workforce that runs regional cricket competitions, and the club officers who provide much needed support and advice to clubs. This puts even more pressure on volunteers to keep clubs operating.

The pandemic prompted a flurry of online webinars, podcasts, and zoom meetings to plan strategies for getting back to play after lockdown. Sport organisations and government have been forced to shift from their usual sales-focused participant recruitment strategies to a more customer-focused participant retention approach.

While funding programs to individuals, families, clubs and sporting organisations may go a long way to kickstart community sports’ recovery, without an overarching strategy to prepare for the sustainable return of community sport, financial handouts will be short-lived.

We advocate for a ‘community sport ecosystem’ perspective – one with a truly strategic systems approach.  This will involve the clubs, national and state sporting organisations, planning departments for sport and recreation at all government levels, industry professionals such as leisure planners, architects, and engineers, and last but not least, local businesses that surround the clubs and supply and benefit from actively engaging with community sport clubs.

We have seen that professional sport can continue without spectators and large crowds, even though empty stands are not a pretty sight. But community sport cannot exist without volunteers – the unsung heroes of sport and our communities, and the ones who are often forgotten.

Now is the time to consider a coordinated strategic recovery effort that supports volunteers and participants alike to be part of a healthy and sustainable club so that community sport can continue to make key contributions to the physical, social and mental health of individuals, families, and communities.

But wasn’t this always going to happen? Did we not see this coming? The reality is that the signs have been blatantly obvious for some time now. As early as 1998 did the then top clubs of Europe join in the so-called G-14 (and later G-18) in order to have a united voice in their negotiations with UEFA and also FIFA. At the time the 14 members had won 41 of 51 European Cups on offer until that time. The G-14 successfully negotiated players should be paid wages on international duties and be compensated if they were to be injured. In 2006 UEFA threatened to impose bans if the G-14 would form a breakaway league. Michal Listkiewicz, the then member of UEFA’s club competitions committee noted that he was going to propose that “players who will participate in any G-14 super league should get a life ban from all UEFA and FIFA competitions”. Clubs responded by arguing that the primary motivation for their proposal was to introduce “more reliable criteria for such competitions, allowing clubs to effectively plan their sporting and business activity”. The power of the G-14 was such that UEFA had to (re)design their club competition structures in a way that would (financially) benefit the most successful (bigger) clubs. The G-14 turned into the European Club Association (ECA) representing in excess of 200 clubs and all seemed reasonably well for more than two decades. But on the 19th of April 2021 the ECA Executive had to convene an emergency meeting following the resignation of 12 ECA members, the 12 that had announced the formation of the European Super League. This includes the resignation of the ECA Chairman Andrea Agnelli, who is also the President and his family company is the majority owner of Juventus. The next day, the six English clubs announced that they would withdraw from the new Super League, two days after its announcement. A major contributing factor to this was the overt condemnation by the British Prime Minister, who noted that the government would take action preventing the English clubs from participating… History, in a way started to repeat itself. However, the owners, governors and managers of the 12 teams involved had put all their cards on the table. What did the cards tell us?

Let us first briefly reflect on the whole of sport during a pandemic, and what the pandemic has alarmingly exposed – that community sport, not professional sport is suffering most. Professional sport has and continues to bear the loss of revenues, mainly through the fact that fans could not, and in many countries cannot come to the stadium. In the case of the top European football clubs however, the Deloitte Sport Business Group reports that the gate receipts represent (for most clubs) a relatively small proportion of the overall income that is generated. Community sport clubs all over the world, however, had to cope with the loss of their primary and often only source of revenue – membership registration fees. Community sport came to grinding halt when members could not play or train. Even in times when sport can be played again in Australia, at present, community sport clubs are struggling to bring back the volunteers. What the owners of football have openly admitted to is that they do not care about community and community sport, that all that counts is to monopolise their playing field, and maximise their profits, most of these going into the pockets of private owners. A European Super League would finalise the journey of European professional football away from community sport, into the realms of uncompromising sport capitalism, and in doing so cutting the umbilical cord to the roots of football. Football (as we know it) is dead, long live football…