The Sport Transparency Index

ended

Integrity is the most fundamental value to sport. Without integrity competition is meaningless. In the current climate it is commonplace, and more often than not warranted, for the all sports stakeholders to question the integrity within sport. Integrity threats are broad, diverse and hugely significant, they can relate directly to sports competition, such as doping, or indirectly to sport competition, such as child protection within the broader sporting environment, in addition to others such as corruption, match fixing and bribery, it is clear that sport faces a very real and tangible threat to credibility. The historical opaqueness of operational execution, standardization and decision-making processes when combined with the commercialisation of sport has created, facilitated and perpetuated an environment of corruption. This is clearly a hugely complex and significant issue where highly sophisticated measures are required to resolve each issue. However, as with any issue integrity solutions should be underpinned and supported by an accessible, concise and relevant benchmarking mechanism that enables quick, simplistic and transparent organisational hygiene reviews to occur. The Sport Transparency Index project (Sport T-Index) has been devised to help support integrity interventions at the most fundamental level. It will help by benchmarking sport stakeholders including clubs, leagues, national associations and international governing bodies using universally applicable and appropriate criteria to evaluate, compare and contrast them against basic integrity-related transparency indicators. This will help to protect sport, as an entirety, from the bottom up and facilitate cross-sport linkages and shared knowledge. It will do this by shining a light on specific areas where transparency needs to improve, quantifying norms across sport, region, leagues and competitions and by recognizing those that truly champion integrity in sport.