Economic Characteristic of Non-Profit Sport Clubs and Their Relations with Municipalities and Sport Federations

Abstract

There is a running discussion about the system of financing sport from public budgets and there are opinions that the sport is not sufficiently supported. We know surprisingly little about the situation of non-profit sport clubs and to find a better support system we have to gather information about the environment of sport clubs. What do we know about relations of sport clubs with public authorities and their own sport union/federation and why do we need to know? The aim of this paper is to gather information about economic situation of sport clubs; to analyze relationships between non-profit sport clubs and municipalities/sport federations with special stress on the problem of transparency; and to discuss consequences of revealed situation. We gathered data from sport clubs and performed an analysis especially for three selected sport branches (athletics, basketball, karate) and we show results of questionnaire among sport club and present examples of practice of randomly selected municipalities. We discovered a significant “failure” in the relationship between sport clubs and their own sport federations. We also showed strong dependency of sport clubs on the grants system respectively we pointed on interesting connection between grants and economic results of sport clubs. Finally we revealed not marginal problem with the transparency during grants allocation.