ABSTRACT
Sports federations are not well analysed with respect to their leading managers and their individual education, job positions, compensation, and career paths. The sport industry is very heterogeneous, consisting of different actors within that system. Therefore, this study investigates sports board members as well as their networking and cooperation with each other. The 12 participants in our study are current CEOs from different national sport federations across the different sport sectors, but all within the structure of nonprofit institutions with honorary boards. Nevertheless, the organisations could either represent nonprofit members (federations, clubs), for-profit members (corporations) or even individual members (sportspeople). The major discussion point in this article is the necessity for and possibility of a general and principal speaker (or voice) for the sport industry in Germany. In general, it was found in the survey that the cooperation between organisations is very loose and only one organisation – the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB e.V.) – has various relationships to some of those other organisations. Therefore, the question is whether the DOSB should take more responsibility in terms of representing the whole sport industry in close cooperation with the other federations.(Abstract was shortened(
