Play the Game launches online versions of governance benchmarking tools

To accommodate the increased interest in sports governance and enable more people to engage in the debate, Play the Game now releases online versions of the Sports Governance Observer tools – one for national federations  (NSGO) and one for international federations (SGO).

Here all stakeholders can make their own unofficial benchmarking of any federation they wish and also compare their scores to the federations that have already been benchmarked by Play the Game’s experts. It is also possible to just compare previous findings without carrying out a benchmarking exercise.

Comprehensive tools based on indicators
The SGO and NSGO tools are very comprehensive tools that score the performance of individual sports federations on a number of indicators through a yes or no system. The SGO tool has 309 indicators and the NSGO tool has 274 indicators that are  divided into four different dimensions: Transparency, democracy, internal accountability and control, and societal responsibility.

For ease of use, the online tool makes it possible to fill in the answers for each dimension individually.

“Benchmarking sports governance is not a simple exercise, but we hope the tool will be useful for all the sports leaders, athletes, researchers, fans, journalists, and other stakeholders who have a serious interest in improving the governance of their sport,” says Jens Sejer Andersen. 

Play the Game has worked with leading academic experts and actors in sport since 2011 on developing the tools and later benchmarking 11 international sports federations and national sports federations in 25 countries on four continents through a process that involves dialogue with the sports federations in question.

The process has provided insights that the online tools may not give in the same way but they can still be very useful in highlighting the good and problematic sides of the state of governance in a given organisations.

“The online tools can give an indication about how efficient an organisation is to counter corruption and mismanagement, but it also shows how good an interaction the organisation has with its members, stakeholders, and the society at large,” Andersen explains.