CLUB OF ENTITIES
César Iribarren, director of the Chair of Sport at the Universitat Politècnica de València, talks with Castellón Base and Valencia Base about the consequences that Covid-19 may have in the world of professional and amateur sports.
The Chair of Sport, which promotes the Master of Sports Management and Master in Sports Management and Active Tourism , maintains a strategic agreement with Castellón Base and Valencia Base with the aim of promoting the creation and use of synergies to improve the dissemination of information and knowledge related to sports management, in entities and applied to sports tourism.
Covid-19 and sports entities
Question -As a consequence of the Covid-19, all professional and amateur sports competitions in Spain and much of the world have been paralyzed. In a totally new situation, how can the manager of a sports club act?
Answer – Sports clubs immersed in official competitions and which are paralyzed are in a very difficult situation. Let’s analyze two sports and economic aspects. From a sports point of view, there is little room for maneuver, the confinement rules are clear and professional or semi-professional athletes have limited their activity to what they can do at home. In any case, the nutritionists, sports psychologists and physical trainers of the clubs have a very important role in helping the athletes at least not deteriorate their physical and mental condition so that after the return to normality, a pre-season of activation can be done. most worthy possible.
In the economic aspect there are many more edges. It is necessary to see the situation in which the companies that sponsor the entities have remained and consequently if there are pending payments, also how the television contracts were closed, the official subsidies pending to liquidate everything can affect the last resources with which a team finishes meeting the financial obligations of the last third of the season.
Another worrying aspect is the termination of the player contract. In semi-satellite entities, the vast majority of contracts are for a single season and these expire on June 30, it will be necessary to see what happens because if those competitions are resumed and are extended more than that date. Let’s not say more about that problem in major competitions because the vast majority of players who end their contracts on June 30 are because they have forced non-renewal and have committed from the next day to another entity.
The challenges of entity management
Q-Do you maintain your teaching activities in the two Master’s degrees taught by the Sports Chair?
A- At the moment we have scheduled until May 10 and complementary educational activities such as seminars, talks, videoconferences, exemplary experiences, all online.
Depending on what the educational authorities decide on matters affecting their own titles, we will program with more knowledge of the cause and prepare what we have left until the end of June, always playing with the possibility that Julio was not a lecturer and also with the characteristic that our titles are resumed in September, ending in November, that gives us a lot of room for maneuver so as not to penalize non-attendance.
P-The gradual return to activity will require leadership in management. Is it time for sports clubs to be run by sufficiently trained people?
R-. That always, not only in moments of crisis. Entities that have prepared managers at their head have a better chance of enduring in adverse situations.
The sports sector is no different from others of an industrial, financial and technological nature, and unfortunately we have seen many companies of all sectoral types that have not endured serious crises such as that of 96 or 08 and others that do weather the storm thanks to having well-prepared managers with ability to reinvent or diversify the action of your entity.
Q-Do you think that a situation of weakness like the current one can build a strength for a well-managed club?
A-Personally, I believe that this situation will be quite traumatic in the short term because the sector is made up of many micro-entities and, consequently, this type of entity tends to bear the ups and downs, the hope is that with the start of the next season, everything will move towards The normality.
If we talk about the large entities, they can better support this traumatic end of the season because they have large social masses, official and television resources that, although they do adjust the budgets, are always a very important floor.
The new “stages” of competitions
For some sports directors they are concerned about the return to competition and the ways of doing it. Are we going to be prepared for that return when it comes to knowing how to comply with certain security protocols?
RA Over the years the uses and customs in sports shows have varied and we have adapted to specific situations.
It has been shown that in educated, civilized societies, homologated to ours, we have known how to adapt to the serious problems, generally of public order, that have been presented to us. Misfortunes such as Heysel or Madrid Arena were a very painful milestone as well as shocking and important and meant a great change in the show model.
Without a doubt, it will be necessary to once again correct the characteristics for the user or the spectator and in amateur sports or even the design base of the competitions themselves.
Q-Do you think that FIFA and UEFA are acting correctly in managing the new football scenarios? Transfer Eurocopa, Club World Cup, etc.
A- It must be borne in mind that although at another level FIFA and UEFA do the same as governments, it is necessary to be able to find the right balance between pandemic in terms of health and in economic terms and that is where the difficulty calibrating accurately. Different scenarios are being studied to hit or at least miss as little as possible.
Q-It is evident that when you want to conclude the competition even in July –league- and August –Champions- dependence on television income is brutal. Is this excessive dependence good?
A-It is not that it is good or bad but it is what it is. When everything has gone well, the entities have grown exponentially, above the normal growth of society, that has led to a lot of employment being generated in the entities, with people trained with specialized people in each club, they have had more economic resources to access higher-level athletes … is what the information society has in real time.
Another reflection is that superprofessional sport is no longer sport, in my point of view it is a show business that has more to do with the show than with sport. It is how to compare the theater made by students of a school or by an amateur group with the blockbusters of Hollywood, consequently for me the legislation of superprofessional sport would have nothing to do with the legislation of that basic, inclusive, semi-professional, minority sport of Leisure …
Q-Are the objectives to be reoriented by the clubs in terms of obtaining new ways of financing sports?
R-It is necessary to reorient that governments invest more in this second type of sport and tend to make superprofessional sport completely private, in the style of the great North American Leagues that depend 100% on private initiative and that public entities overturn all their policies in that other sport that we have mentioned.
Q- Are you going to reorient your training content – that of the Master’s degrees – according to the new scenarios that will open up in the world of sports?
A- We reorient the contents of our masters almost daily, but more focusing on the line of that sport in which we believe. Obviously the sport of “show business” is present because it is a reference, it is like the technological advances that are tested in Formula 1 and that after a while they adapt and are seen in the most utilitarian models, but focusing and focusing our training in semi-professional sports, sports tourism, leisure sports, health, inclusive … because it is where there are more job opportunities and more growth in these times.
Q- Will you keep registration deadlines for upcoming editions?
A-Yes, in principle and I go out the government’s instructions, we will start the first fortnight of October as usual, in fact we already have a third of registrations already made for our XVI edition of the Master in Sports Business Management and the VII of the Master of sport management and active and sports tourism.
The Polytechnic University of Valencia has great strength in its distance learning, that makes us choose two modalities over two thirds of our students. Students who already work and who are looking for us to improve their professionalization and training or even athletes, trainers or monitors who are already in the process of making a change in their lives by going from the field of the facility to the office to the management they choose in that modality to make your daily work compatible with your growth prospects.
The other third are usually students who can either combine their chores with training or, as happens in the vast majority of cases, students who have completed degrees in Physical Activity and Sport Sciences, business administration and management, tourism, law, journalism. … .In short, any university graduate who wants to focus his activity on sports management or sports tourism management.
