At present, the continuous decline of the physical health indicators and the insufficient participation in sports activities among the youth in China are becoming prominent. There is also divergence in the operation modes of youth sports clubs between commercialization and public welfare. This study aims to explore the operational characteristics of different types of youth sports clubs, analyze their synergistic paths in policy-driven and market mechanisms, and provide a theoretical basis for optimizing the supply of youth sports services. Method: By methods of literature research and interviews, policy texts on the development of youth sports clubs in China and related overseas literature were systematically sorted, and thus a theoretical analysis framework was constructed. Experts in related fields were selected to conduct in-depth interviews, and the core conclusions were refined according to the analytical framework and interviews. (1) The operation type of youth sports clubs in China is mainly divided into commercialization mode and public welfare mode, with the development of commercial clubs relying mainly on the market mechanism and public welfare ones relying more on the leadership of relevant policies. (2) The level of personalized sports services for youth in commercial youth sports clubs is better than that in public youth sports clubs. (3) Public welfare youth sports clubs mainly rely on government-purchased services. Despite their insufficient market-oriented synergy, they are irreplaceable in universal services. The study found that policy guidance for youth sports clubs can effectively improve service equity, while market mechanisms can activate social resources to enhance service diversity. In the development of youth sports clubs, the dilemma of synergy in between is due to the difference in objectives: policy focuses on fairness, while the market pursues efficiency. The synergy between policy guidance and market mechanism should be further refined, and the enhancement of public welfare and efficiency should be realized through the establishment of an incentive-compatible mechanism of “policy guidance-market response”. In the future, there will be “layered synergy”: basic sports services will ensure universality by policies, while higher-order needs will be customized through market mechanisms. The limitations of this study are that it does not analyze the differences in youth sports clubs in different regions with different levels of economic development, and it does not quantify the synergistic effect.
He Zhu (Thu,) studied this question.