The future of sport … what does it look like from where you are?

The future of sport … what does it look like from where you are?

If I had a pound for every time someone says that we all work in tramlines or stovepipes … well I wouldn’t be writing this piece. It happened again last week when I was talking to the Head of Safeguarding and player welfare in a major sport. She was only talking from her NGB perspective not across the stakeholders in our sector.

As a self-employed independent consultant I cannot influence change on my own, I have to collaborate and encourage others to do the same to have a sustainable impact. The alternative is the more common exercise of ‘ticking boxes’ (another cliché that could have made me wealthy.) I’m pleased to say collaboration has worked for me, for example creating a mental health strategy for Isle of Man Sport Aid and also creating Community Wellbeing Hubs for the Rugby Football League. Both now owned by the key stakeholders and thriving. My role used my independent status, so I had no agendas, and I facilitated discussion and decision making, where all opinions were valued  

I am now working in arguably the biggest challenge of encouraging sustainable collaboration by bringing stakeholders in two different sectors together. Two sectors where I have, I hope, ‘left my scent’. This opportunity has come about thanks to my client CIMSPA who, under the leadership of Tara Dillon, are working to secure the future not only of the sport and activity sector but also to increase its value to society in terms of economic wealth and wellbeing.

My role has been to bring the sport and activity sector , where I currently reside, closer to the financial services sector where I once had a career. The critical point is this. 20 years ago when I was working in insuring sport there was a reasonably healthy competitive market. But all the safeguarding concerns, culture reviews, threats of class actions regarding concussions etc have had a detrimental effect on the market. There are less insurers interested in underwriting sports business. For those that remain, the pressure from their shareholders to make profits threatens the affordability of premiums.

Working closely with Colin Huffen the Policy Director at CIMSPA we have created a Specialist Expert Group of key insurance underwriters and brokers as well as specialist sports insurance lawyers and NGB representatives. The purpose of this group is to make them all aware of CIMSPA’s work on workforce development, minimum professional standards and using their informed independence to assess training and education provision. There are some NGBs like British Triathlon and British Gymnastics who are embracing the standards AND engaging their insurers in this to offer them reassurance when the latter assess the risks. We are working hard to make the insurance sector more aware of CIMSPA’s work and to embrace it in their working practices.

In recent weeks CIMSPA held a workforce event for NGBs in Nottingham when over 80 CEOs and Workforce Development Managers (as well as Sport England) attended. In my presentation and Q&A I was grateful to the members of the insurance industry present who emphasised how important they now viewed CIMSPA’s role. The journey, as the cliché goes, is far from over. But this collaboration has got momentum notwithstanding the general resistance to change arguably prevalent in both sectors. There’s still politics to overcome and the temptations to get back in our own tramlines, but underneath this I believe there is a recognition of the need to change and collaborate. It’s great to have a leading role in this work.