Project

Sports associations form the basis of mass sports participation in many European countries.

Amateur Sports Clubs (ASCs) are an essential component of many sports delivery systems around the world. ASCs contribute to the achievement of objectives related to various dimensions, such as sports missions as well as social missions related or not to sports such as integration, youth, health, leisure, educational, political education. For many years, amateur sports clubs have been facing significant tensions: reduction in public funding, growing instrumentalization by public authorities, increased commercialisation and competition from private sports suppliers.

At the same time, ASCs are increasingly confronted with the economic effects of financial and health crises. These multiple tensions that ASCs have to face result in a transformation of their economic model, which can lead to a shift in the organisation's objectives and to dysfunctions. The Socio Economic Models of Amateur Sport Clubs (SEMASC) project is a cooperation partnership between 5 European countries in close relation with one non-European partner bringing together multiple stakeholders from the non-profit sport sector (Olympic Committee, National Sports Agencies, Federations, National Institute of non-profit organisations) and researchers.

The main objective of the SEMASC project is to create training materials to assist amateur sports clubs through parameters and indicators to assess and improve their socioeconomic model. It will give federations and Olympic committees the opportunity to enable the transformation and organizational change leading to improvements and new approaches to socioeconomic model of amateur sports clubs.

The second objective is to allow Olympic committees and federations to increase the resilience of ASCs. The resilience of the ASCs is becoming recently one of the most common challenges for sport organisations mainly due to the Covid-19 crisis.

The SEMASC project is a European partnership gathering researchers, national sports agencies, Olympic committes and sports federations in Europe and Latin America, aiming to create training materials to assist amateur sports clubs through parameters and indicators to assess and improve their socioeconomic model and increase their resilience.

This EU cooperation partnership was awarded with a Erasmus+ Sport co-funding, with a 400,000€ grant for a period of 36 months.