Back to the starting blocks

After a year of Eugen Jurzyca serving as Minister of Education and Sport, his reform team presented a proposal for a new sports funding model based largely on objective criteria — success plus a sport’s popularity. It met resistance from most sports federations (although the largest federations were the first to agree, as the model suited them). The plan never got a chance to take hold, as the eurozone bailout vote and a subsequent no-confidence motion brought down Iveta Radičová’s government — sending this ambitious attempt to make sports funding more transparent to the political scrap heap.

Later, new minister Dušan Čaplovič took a close look at the bottom of the sports budget, and what much of the sporting community had once seen as a dangerous idea was given a chance to restart (to be fair, some in the ruling Smer party can occasionally recognize a necessary measure just minutes before midnight). The new model for financing part of sports expenses (such as national teams and certain disciplines) now closely resembles the one created by Tokos and his team — albeit with Čambal’s subtle addition of boosting domestic interest in certain sports. This is logical, because it’s impossible to find a fair method of distributing sports funds without considering athletes’ results at home and abroad, as well as public interest (especially among children and youth) in a given sport.

It seems the basic direction for financing sports federations has now been settled. However, unresolved “details” remain — the classic billion-euro target for sports, sponsorship in sport, tax write-offs, a dedicated sports TV channel, linking betting revenues to sports funding, problematic fans and problem-free sports, national versus private stadiums, “top-tier” leagues versus basement-level conditions, and whether professional hockey can survive without joining multinational competitions. All of this suggests that in this parliamentary term, sport is once again lingering somewhere near the starting blocks.