The gold rush: Analysis of the performance of the Spanish Olympic federations

Financial Sustainability and Earnings Management in the Spanish Sports Federations: A Multi-Theoretical Approach

“…The dependence on public subsidies of federated sport [5,29], and the financial deficits of the sector [18] have contributed to the consolidation over time of a management model characterized by coercive pressure from governments through the financing of NPSOs, significant in countries such as Canada [30], the United Kingdom [31], Australia and New Zealand [32], Spain [29], Germany [33] and more recently Turkey [34] and Greece [15], but less significant in Norway and Belgium [35,36]. In this sense, the influence of the environment will depend on each specific national sports system.…”

“…Therefore, the importance that current sports development systems attribute to elite sport over mass sport [15], and the responsibility of the NSFs on the development of elite sport [5], justifies the growing literature on the performance of elite sport with public funding and government participation (e.g., [40,41]), as well as on the negative repercussions of a government de-investment in sport [15]. This is because, for NPSOs that depend heavily on state funding, resistance to adopting new regulation, legislation and other forms of change can lead to reduced investment in sport and a loss of valuable state subsidies [23].…”

“…Spain has developed a mixed model in which sports federations receive funds in the form of unconditional grants from the CSD, and revenues from private sources (licenses, sponsors and international organizations). Torres et al [5], and Martin et al show a great disparity between NSFs in terms of funding. Thus, public funding provides more than 90% of resources in some federations such as weightlifting and boxing, while in others it does not reach 20% (basketball and Tennis).…”

“…Additionally, in Spain high-level sports are considered a matter of State interest [4]. Due to this, the development of high-level and high-performance sports resides with the NSFs [6], for which they receive public resources on which they depend to a great extent, and which they must manage efficiently to obtain competitive results [5]. In this sense, sustainability requires a triple bottom line approach, where improvements are pursued in the social, environmental and economic dimensions of performance [7], and NSFs are organizations with social and environmental goals and a growing need to manage their resources efficiently.…”

Presenting an Executive Model for Improving the Performance of Sports Federations

“…A number of studies, including Papadimitriou and Taylor (2000); Shilbury and Moore (2006) and Eydi, Ramzaninezgad, Yosefi, and Malekakhlagh (2014) considered the effectiveness of sports organizations and evaluated their performance with this approach (7)(8)(9). In addition, Honari, Mohammadi, Ghafori, and Afshari (2013); Mirfakhredini, Peymanfar, Oghada, and Alimohammadi (2013); Nezad Sajadi and Soleimani Damaneh (2014); Solntsev and Osokin (2018) and Torres, Martin and Guevara (2018) tried to do evaluation by identifying strengths and weaknesses of the performance of the sports organizations for better improvement (10)(11)(12)(13)(14).…”