The Sponsorship of Amateur Sport—Government, National Sport Organization, and Corporate Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract There is increasing pressure on Canada's National Sport Organizations (NSOs) to seek non-governmental sources of funding for the operation of their programs. Although there was some evidence of the re-commodification of sport and leisure given in the 1986 Nielsen Task Force on Program Review, this pressure to seek corporate funding has manifested itself in the two most recent federal Task Force reports on the sport system in Canada, Towards 2000 and Sport: The Way Ahead. One area in which NSOs are being urged to seek alternatives to government support is in that of corporate sponsorship. Despite the growing pressure to acquire funds from the business sector, there is a surprising paucity of analytic literature on the subject of corporate sponsorship of sport in general, and of amateur sport in particular. This paper analyzes the issue of corporate sponsorship of sport from the perspectives of the three central agents involved: the government, corporations, and NSOs. It is argued that there are a ...