Two federations. Same budget. Same governance rules. Same sector, even the same continent. One runs structured training cycles and protects a learning budget through lean years. The other funds staff development only when there’s money left over — which there rarely is.
If you’ve worked in more than one sport organisation, you’ve seen this split. The usual explanation is money: the well-funded federation trains its people, the cash-strapped one doesn’t. It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong.
THE RESEARCH
Sport has told itself for years that people are its greatest asset — coaches, administrators, officials are what actually deliver the product. And yet investment in developing that asset stays patchy, reactive, and often absent altogether. Many organisations have no learning budget at all; where training happens, it’s frequently unplanned and never evaluated.
To find out why, I surveyed 1,521 employees and managers across sport organisations in North and South America — two regions with genuinely different institutional cultures. North America leans market-driven and professionalised, with workforce development often already folded into long-term strategy. South America runs more often through federation-based, publicly funded structures, where development typically sits lower on the agenda and funding is less predictable. Respondents spanned clubs, leagues, federations and governing bodies of every size.
The results were tested two separate ways — through statistical modelling and, independently, through machine learning and cluster analysis — to make sure the answer didn’t depend on one method’s assumptions. Both pointed the same direction.
THE FINDING THAT SHOULD UNSETTLE YOU
Managerial attitudes mattered, as expected. Where managers actively backed learning, staff were more engaged and the organisation invested more. Where managers treated learning as a cost to be minimised, engagement and investment both fell. Nothing surprising there.
The single strongest predictor of investment was not what managers believed about learning — it was whether that belief had been built into the organisation’s systems.
Call it strategic and systemic development orientation. It’s the difference between a manager who thinks training matters and an organisation where training happens whether or not that manager is in the room that day.
More precisely, this systemic orientation turned out to be the mechanism — the channel through which a manager’s good intentions actually become spending. A manager who values learning but hasn’t embedded it into budgeting and planning rarely changes what the organisation spends. The belief has nowhere to go.
Altogether, the model explained just over half the variation in investment between organisations — a strong result for research of this kind. Investment in people, in other words, isn’t a discretionary financial afterthought. It’s the predictable output of a philosophy that’s been converted into routine practice, or the predictable absence of one that hasn’t.
SAME PATTERN, DIFFERENT INTENSITY
The structure held in both regions — the same drivers pushed in the same direction across two very different institutional cultures. What varied was severity. Restrictive, cost-focused management did more damage in South America, where the surrounding institutional support for development is generally thinner. Put simply: where the system already backs development, one sceptical manager can’t do much harm. Where it doesn’t, that scepticism compounds.
The organisations also sorted into three recognisable types — development-oriented, restrictive, and mixed — and this grouping predicted investment behaviour independently of how much money an organisation had. A well-resourced but restrictive organisation still behaved like a restrictive one. This is a large part of why generic capacity-building support so often misses: it assumes every organisation starts from the same place.
A parallel study of 262 employees and managers across European sport bodies — in and around Switzerland and Croatia — found the identical gap: strong stated belief in the value of education, paired with low actual training frequency and few dedicated budgets. Two continents, two independent samples, the same structural pattern. That’s not a coincidence worth ignoring.
WHAT TO ACTUALLY DO ABOUT IT
For managers in sport organisations
Valuing development is necessary, not sufficient. Three moves matter more than good intentions:
- Put development into the planning calendar, not the wish list, and review it on the same cycle as everything else that’s taken seriously.
- Protect a standing development budget line, however modest. Leftover money behaves nothing like committed money.
- Evaluate what you fund. Untracked training stays occasional; tracked training becomes practice.
For governing bodies and federations
One-size-fits-all interventions will misfire, because organisations aren’t starting from the same place. A restrictive organisation needs a different kind of help than one already oriented toward development — and simply mandating that organisations report on investment, without addressing the managerial orientation driving it, won’t shift much.
For leadership and capacity-building programmes
Where restrictive attitudes bite hardest — South America, in this data — programmes should tackle the attitudinal barrier first, before moving to systems. Where the gap between belief and practice is already narrower, the faster win is helping organisations formalise what they already lean toward.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Sport organisations vary enormously in how much they invest in their people, and the familiar excuses — tight budgets, small size, governance constraints — don’t fully explain the gap. What does is simpler and less comfortable: whether belief has been converted into system.
Organisations that have done that work invest more, regardless of size or geography. Organisations that haven’t tend not to — no matter how sincerely they say people are their greatest asset. For a sector that has spent years repeating that line, the challenge is no longer belief. It is building the machinery that makes the belief true.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dejan Laninović is founder and CEO of the Institute for Sport, Events & Hospitality (ISEH) in Geneva and a former professional volleyball player. He holds governance roles in national and international sport bodies and researches human-capital development in sport organisations. This article draws on his doctoral research.
