The debate on sports reform is not over yet

Representatives of dissatisfied sports federations met with President Ivan Gašparovič and also with Minister Eugen Jurzyca

The discussion within the sports movement about reforming the financing of sport continues even in the last week before the elections. Minister of Education Eugen Jurzyca is open to convincing arguments and comments from sports federations, and the president of the Slovak Olympic Committee, František Chmelár, acknowledges that the sports movement needs reform of sport and its financing, even if he has reservations about the current proposal from the team of external advisers. “We all agree that we need sports reform. The question is what it will look like, who will prepare it, and how,” Chmelár told Šport daily.

Agreement possible?
Yesterday, representatives of the Slovak Olympic Committee (František Chmelár), the Association of Technical and Sporting Activities (Miloslav Benca), and the Confederation of Sports Federations of the Slovak Republic (Marián Kukumberg) met not only with Slovak President Ivan Gašparovič, but also discussed the principles of reform and objections to it with the leadership of the Ministry of Education and Minister Jurzyca’s team of external advisers.

According to Jozef Tokos, head of the minister’s advisory team, consensus on the need for reform is a good foundation for further negotiations and fine-tuning of the current proposal for sports financing, where rational comments from sports federations should be accepted to the greatest extent possible – both those already submitted in response to the minister’s call and those emerging from today’s discussion between federation representatives, the sports department, and Tokos’s team.

According to Richard Galovič, another member of the team behind the sports financing project, consensus in the sports movement on the need for reform is encouraging, as is agreement on the need for clear, measurable, and transparent rules. However, both sides have yet to bridge a key misunderstanding – the weight of popularity, which is one of the main criteria in calculating funding for individual sports (the others being athletes’ success in international competition and the number of child members aged 10 to 18). Galovič stressed that little can be changed about the basic marketing principle: “Success achieved in an extremely popular sport is more valuable than success in a sport with low popularity.”

František Chmelár admitted the reform of sports financing has a rational foundation: “It can be built upon, but criteria need to be added and flaws that create a sense of injustice need to be removed. A transparent model is desirable and necessary, because any subjective inputs will not bring positive results.” The head of the Slovak Olympic Committee, however, reiterated his objections, which concerned not only the procedural side of preparing the reform of sports financing – which, he argued, should have been preceded by a general reform of sport – but also the fact that the current proposal is only partial, addressing only redistribution of funds within the Ministry of Education’s budget, without tackling financing from private sources, local governments, or other ministries such as defense and interior.

Where mistakes were made
Yesterday’s negotiations also showed that many misunderstandings could have been avoided if the authors of the financing reform had informed the sports federations earlier about the intentions and details of the project. Under time pressure after the fall of the government, they did not find enough time to explain the philosophy of the financing change and how it would be implemented, Galovič said. At the same time, he is convinced that “in meetings with key sports federations and representatives of the Slovak Olympic Committee and the Confederation of Sports Federations, we can convince them that the direction we have set is correct and in the interest of Slovak sport.”

Team leader Jozef Tokos also admitted that if such meetings had been organized at the beginning of the year, they would have had an extra month to explain the principles of the reform and to take legitimate comments from the federations into account. Galovič agreed it is still possible to incorporate convincing federation comments into the project – whether concerning the weight of individual criteria in the media index or conducting better and higher-quality public opinion research regarding the popularity of sports.

“The result of such a discussion and alignment of the sports movement with the proposed model should be that the sports community will be able to take care of all Slovak athletes who are successful and bring a good name to our country abroad. I am convinced that if we manage to unify Slovak sport and prove that the internal conditions are clean, clear, and transparent, we will be able to jointly ask society for greater support for sport,” Galovič said. At today’s meeting, Tokos’s team and the sports department of the Ministry of Education will discuss the federations’ comments. The aim is an agreement between the ministry, the expert team, and the sports federations – indeed the entire sports movement – on transparent criteria for distributing funds, so that no minister in the future can allocate them based on personal preferences. (...)