Towards an Online Safety Audit Framework for Sports Organisations: An Online Delphi Conference Study

Digital platforms are integral to the governance, commercialisation, and everyday operations of sport, yet they also expose athletes, officials, and other stakeholders to persistent online harms such as harassment, threats, and identity-based hate. Organisational responses remain uneven and often rely on platform-specific or event-specific measures rather than sustained, organisation-centred capability. This study investigates how online safety can be operationalised as a governance capability for sport organisations, and which capability domains and controls should structure such an assessment framework. Using a two-stage design, we first conducted a rapid evidence assessment to derive candidate organisational controls, then ran a two-round online Delphi conference with 35 experts from 14 countries across sport governance, safeguarding, psychology, sociology, law, and computer science. The resulting framework comprises 124 audit items across five capability domains: policy and governance, monitoring and filtering, awareness and training, community engagement, and incident management. By translating abstract safeguarding principles into observable, auditable practices, the framework helps sport organisations diagnose gaps, plan proportionate controls, and embed safeguarding online, while offering a structured basis for comparative research and policy development.