The European Sport Model (ESM) has been understood as a defining framework for how sport is organised, governed and practised across Europe. The model assumes that grassroots and elite-level sport are united by financial solidarity mechanisms. It builds on the principle of promotion and relegation in open competitions, and it establishes sport as a values-based activity and a critical instrument of social and public infrastructure.Despite this, the main observation underpinning this research is that the ESM does not holistically capture how the majority of sports are organised and how European citizens engage with physical activity. This observation has long been recognised at the highest level of European policymaking. As early as 1998, the same year and in the same report that the term “European Sport Model” is first used, the European Commission recognised that many grassroots and elite stakeholders felt unrepresented by the sports federations that claimed to speak on their behalf (European Commission, Directorate-General X, 1998b, Section 3.1). In the 2007 White Paper on Sport, the European Commission acknowledged that defining a single organisational model for sport in Europe was unrealistic, given the complexity and diversity of national structures (Commission of the European Communities, 2007a, p. 12).This has spurred growing concerns and led to the research question guiding our inquiry: “To what extent does the ESM reflect the diversity of the organisation of and participation in sporting activity in Europe?” Our research finds that the current ESM does not present a cohesive framework that is representative of the depth and breadth of the realities of the organisation of and participation in sporting activity in Europe.
Vandenberg et al. (Thu,) studied this question.