Jan Filc: Sport is not fulfilling its fundamental mission

During the tenure of former education minister Eugen Jurzyca, you were an adviser in the group around Jozef Tokos, which developed a new model of sports financing.

What parts of it have been carried over into the new concept of the current minister, Dušan Čaplovič?
“Quite a few positive things were adopted. In Tokos’s concept, Minister Jurzyca had pledged that over five years the amount of money going into sport would roughly double. The limiting factor, however, was maximum transparency of financial flows. To increase state support for sport, sources need to be sought not only from the education ministry, but also from the ministries of health, interior, and labor.”

The current economic situation is not favorable for sport. There are strikes taking place, and every minister is struggling just to keep his own department alive.
“Slovak sport is still paying for the faulty decision of former finance minister Brigita Schmögnerová twelve years ago, when she deprived it of lottery revenues. Sport thus lost 45 percent of its guaranteed funding, which is a significant loss.”

Sport is losing out elsewhere as well. Why is that?
“Sports officials, fearing for their positions and their guaranteed shares of the state budget, continually refused transformation. In doing so, they maintain a deadlock. They do not realize that as the general costs of living and operations rise, they are constantly losing even more money. In the latest version of Tokos’s reform, we guaranteed that even the smaller sports would face zero cuts.”

(Interview with Ján Filc)