Professional football clubs in Europe are getting new owners at an increasing speed. However, only a handful of European countries try to regulate club ownership and the focus is mainly financial. Steve Menary outlines the state of affairs on tests of club owners and directors.

The voting system ’one nation, one vote’ is used in most international sports federations, but it leads to challenges to good governance. In this article, we present new research to stimulate debate about alternatives to ‘one nation, one vote’.

A journalistic pioneer whose work was crucial for uncovering the culture of corruption in world sport for almost 25 years: Andrew Jennings set new and higher standards for journalistic coverage of sports politics. Play the Game’s international director looks back on a career marked by charisma, controversy, and cooperation among colleagues.

The Olympic future of weightlifting is shaky. This is not so much due to the doping culture that was allowed to flourish for decades in the traditional Olympic sport. Now it is long-discredited officials of the International Weightlifting Federation who consider themselves untouchable. They are putting the brakes on reforms and, above all, on new elections.

For its 25th anniversary conference, Play the Game invites you to engage in open, fact-based and constructive debates on themes that are essential to the future of sport. The abstract submission for Play the Game 2022 is now open.

In 2020, Belarusian athletes forced the IOC to suspend the head of the Belarusian NOC, Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko, but the regime of ‘Europe’s last dictator’ still controls Belarusian sport, and athletes are still detained and fined for expressing their political views without help from the IOC.

According to a new survey conducted by Play the Game, athletes have largely lost confidence in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). They do not consider the CAS to be "independent" and "impartial", but rather an extension of the sports federations, where proceedings drag on irregularly and they are financially disadvantaged.

More than 20 researchers have contributed to the new anthology “Good Governance in Sport. Critical Reflections” which is now freely available as an e-book via the homepage of Routledge.