Sports Funding Act: Still a cracking debate on the home stretch

KSo it should be next week. Then the “Draft of a law regulating the promotion of top-class sport and other measures of national importance in sport as well as the establishment of the top-class sports agency” could go to the federal cabinet, also known as the “Sports Promotion Act”. And so the milestone of a reform that is even tougher than the name of this new legislative proposal could be reached.

For almost a decade, organized sport and politics in this country have repeatedly tried to overhaul the convoluted machinery through which funding flows into top-class sport. The only visible effect so far, however, was this: more and more millions trickled into the system, the returns at the Olympics and World Championships became worse and worse, in the medal table and behind.

The so-called “top sports agency”, the heart of the new sports funding law, is now supposed to correct this static. Above all, it should manage funding independently in the future, free from influences from politics and organized sport, especially its umbrella organization, the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB). But in recent weeks, one of the same battles that has repeatedly blocked many reforms in recent years has broken out around the planned agency. And at the moment almost everyone who was involved is more or less damaged: organized sport – but also politics up to the Chancellery, which is responsible for top-class sport.

Christiane Schenderlein, the Minister of State for Sport and Volunteering, originally wanted to present the revised Sports Funding Act to the cabinet at the beginning of the year. But after the DOSB complained that politicians secured all sorts of rights of intervention in the small print in the first draft, Bavarian politicians recently presented their veto: “The sports associations need the greatest possible freedom of decision instead of state interference,” said Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) after the Winter Olympics Bild. Most recently, the bill was reportedly stuck with his party colleague, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt.

The CSU recently emphasized that there is of course a strict separation: criticism of the content of the law on the one hand, and the interests of Bavarian state politics on the other. Not only in political Berlin, but also within sport, many people now have a different impression. It is the top sports associations that the CSU is currently conspicuously rushing to help, including in the sports committee when it recently discussed the state of the debate-ridden German speed skating and short track community. And next fall, these associations will play a key role in deciding which German region should apply for the 2036, 2040 or 2044 Summer Olympics – Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne-Rhine-Ruhr or Munich. Could some leading associations then remember the benevolent attitude of the Bavarian state government?

The explosive thing: The DOSB has recently done little to refute this impression. He stated internally that consideration was being given to locating the sports agency under his own roof – with which the DOSB, fun factwould do exactly what he had previously accused politicians of with crocodile tears: namely, transferring the agency to its own hemisphere. Olaf Tabor, the board member responsible for competitive sports in the DOSB, admitted in an email (which was first reported by the “Sport&Politics” portal) which extra-parliamentary opposition was apparently pushing this project forward: “From the sports policy environment in Bavaria, in the course of the discussion in the past few weeks, both a critical positioning of the Prime Minister has become apparent and the alternative consideration of an ‘agency under the roof of the DOSB’ has emerged.”

The Minister of State rejects the DOSB’s plans

Christiane Schenderlein, the Minister of State for Sport and Volunteering, recently felt compelled to fundamentally and publicly bang on the table. “We cannot achieve real independence under the umbrella of the DOSB as the umbrella organization of the grant recipients,” she told the FAZ. They are sticking to building up the top sports agency “independently of politics and organized sport”. This is the only way to “ensure the necessary democratic chain of legitimacy for the allocation of tax resources”. In other words: Organized sport is not allowed to receive tax funds and have a significant say in where they should flow. The Federal Audit Office had repeatedly criticized the fact that this had long been the norm.

So for now, some of those involved are left feeling pretty battered: on the one hand, Bavarian politicians with their attempts to make the sports associations happy. On the other hand, the DOSB in particular. The idea of ​​dragging the top sports agency under its roof was also floated past many sports officials who have been working on reforms relating to the Sports Funding Act in the background for months. When the DOSB board chairman Otto Fricke informed the state sports associations, as a representative of popular sports, of these plans in Düsseldorf at the beginning of March, many felt taken by surprise. The Lower Saxony LSB boss Reinhard Rawe, usually not one for large protest gestures, angrily withdrew from a working group on the funding law. Others did not complain about Bavaria’s first solo effort; They were reminiscent, for example, of the attempt to blow the whistle on the domestic race for the Olympic bid after the citizens of Munich voted overwhelmingly in favor of an application last October.

It is undisputed that organized sport has weakened itself in its efforts to influence the sports funding law in its favor, as it reaches the home stretch. “This development is a step backwards,” said Thomas Härtel, President of the Berlin State Sports Association, to the SZ on Monday. They support the request to create an independent agency, although the expertise of the sport must be brought in “on an equal footing”. In any case, one must recognize that “in the end, the budget legislator always has the last word.”

And Minister Schenderlein? It seems to have at least parried the sport’s worst attack. Everything else remains to be seen until the final draft law is available. It will also be interesting to see how things unfold in your own, still relatively new ministry. According to reports, the DOSB had not only heard its concerns from Bavarian politicians – but also from one or two people in the Chancellery who are not called Christiane Schenderlein.