SportBoard is an intersectoral project initiative, aiming to improve good governance of grassroots sport organizations and governing bodies by proposing a holistic approach towards monitoring and managing ethics behaviour of child and young athletes. The project is a follow-up initiative of successful implementation of Erasmus Plus Sport Collaborative Partnership “Ethics for Sport” (E4S) that was aimed at development of innovative mechanisms to promote Codes of Ethics in grassroots sports and ensure its effective enforcement. The project activities were focused on the development of Codes of Ethic and digital tools for registration of its implementation via an innovative App. After the project ended some project partners (SCC and Anderlini) came up with the idea to go further with the development of innovative mechanisms of monitoring and managing athletes’ ethics behaviour in sport for providing good governance in sport. In this regard, the SportBoard initiative will directly contribute to the Sport sector specific priority “Improving good governance in sport”.
  • harassment & bullying
  • discrimination
  • doping
  • abuse
  • violence
  • match fixing

The SportBoard project intends to develop and test a holistic approach towards good governance for grassroots sport organizations and governing bodies based on monitoring, evaluation and management of athletes’ ethics behaviour. Good governance will be based on a systemic work of definition of ethics behaviour indicators, their registration, monitoring and management for providing efficient self-regulation of grass-roots sport organizations. SportBoard behaviour indicators will be organised around at least the 6 following categories of behaviour: (1) harassment & bullying; (2) discrimination, whether it be based on origin, colour, gender, religion, disability or sexual orientation; (3) doping; (4) abuse, including sexual abuse; and (5) violence, (6) match fixing.

These categories of behaviours were chosen on one hand because they can be significant barriers for sport as a positive social practice and a tool for community cohesion2 and on the hand sport practice itself can contribute to combat these types of behaviours by enforcing positive values and managing ethical behavior. EU Sport policies and studies promote the importance to combat the mentioned categories of behaviours:

Ø “Study on gender-based violence in sport” (EC, 2016) describes cases across Europe on bullying, harassment and sextual abuse in child, youth and adult sport. The document underlines that “bullying, discrimination, physical violence, and gender-based violence and harassment have no place in sport” and EU members need to take systemic actions to work on that.

Ø White Paper of Sport (2007) declares the importance of all EU members and types of sport organizations to combat any type of discrimination and also to “join forces in the fight against doping”.

Ø Match-fixing is considered as one of the most serious problems facing sport. Globalisation has further aggravated the phenomenon with transnational criminal organisations taking advantage of changes in regulations, and flaws in legal and judicial systems. Thus a set of special measures should be taken to combat match-fixing.