Certain nations invest considerable resources training athletes for elite sporting events, like the Olympic Games or the football World Cup.
Certain nations invest considerable resources training athletes for elite sporting events, like the Olympic Games or the football World Cup. It would be much more productive to invest that money in processes by which children can be encouraged to take up sports at a young age. How far have you come to agree or disagrees?
Distributing public funding between elite athletic preparation and grassroots sports participation is perhaps the most stubbornly contested question in sports policy, as each perspective assumes more fundamentally different conceptions of what sporting investment ought to be about and who should ultimately benefit. I pretty much accept the idea that encouraging kids to play sport at a very young age is a better use of public funds than spending dollars on grooming elite athletes to perform at peak in major international competitions, but think strategic compromise that takes advantage of both types of investments beats ignoring the elite sport funding completely.
There is a good case to be made for investing in grassroots youth sports on multiple dimensions at once. There are sizeable and well-evidenced public health returns from high rates of childhood participation in physical activity. By engaging in sport as a child, the habit of physical activity is instilled and remains with individuals through their lifespan reducing the levels of obesity, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes while also alleviating sedentary lifestyle challenges related to mental health. In light of the unprecedented and escalating impact that lifestyle-derived chronic disease is having on global public health systems, funding towards childhood sport engagement can be viewed as a bona fide preventative healthcare framework, where the financial return-on-investment from decreased subsequent burden of treatment need (in terms of future healthcare costs likely far outstripping the initial investment). A great example of this is the experience in the UK post 2012 London Olympics, where an incredible amount of elite delivery investment produced record success but little of the promised legacy and much disappointment because they (along with their elite facilities) had not invested at the grassroots level to match success efforts.
The payoffs of formal childhood sports participation go far beyond the physical domain. Team sports build cooperation, communication skills, loss and resilience and teaching how to function under pressure — valuable skills in the workplace (and elsewhere) that formal education fails to teach head-on. Self-discipline and goal-setting, the kinds of experience that are helped with improvement through sustained deliberate practice — these skills developed by participating in individual sports transfer exceedingly well to almost any human activity. Many of these developmental outcomes have broad societal returns processing through entire cohorts of children, whether or not any individual child ends up with elite athletic capability, making grassroots investment inherently wider-seeking in its social returns than funding for elite programmes.
Although less compelling as the main rationale for public spending, the case for continued elite sports investment is nevertheless credible and one that serious analysis should recognise. Winning on the international sports stage induces a sense of national pride and social cohesion that is real, albeit difficult to measure economic value — the collective experience of success on behalf of our nations provides bottom-up social cohesion and mobilises national identity in ways that positively impact our future and individual quality-of-life. Elite athletes also act as role models for children and thus can lead to more young people participating in sport even if they do not take part in elite-level sports themselves, producing knock-on grassroots participation effects that investment directly focused on grassroots activity cannot replicate. The tourism, broadcasting revenues and commercial sponsorship resulting from hosting successful major international competitions bring with them additional economic justifications for elite investment which should not be ignored entirely.
Moreover, as the question is currently framed elite and grassroots investment are not an either or situation. Much of the infrastructure developed for elite programme purposes can be open to community participants (including reach and impact of coaching expertise) leading to efficiencies that would make such combined investment a more compelling case than either programme individually. Countries including Australia and Germany have shown that elite and grassroots sports can be combined into a single delivery system, so long as the investment in each is designed to complement rather than compete with rather than against one another — enabling both international success and community benefit.
In summary, I mostly support spending public resources on creating opportunities for children to participate in sport as opposed to a focus solely on preparing individuals and teams for elite competition. The health, developmental and social dividends from grassroots investment are more widely dispersed and more guaranteed in their provision than the far grander but much narrower gains from elite sporting success. The most tenable position, however, is not to reallocate all elite funding towards grassroots programmes but rather to strategically design national investment approaches that fulfil both purposes in a timely manner while genuinely complementing each other.