Building a Sports Nation, Part 9.
Building a Sports Nation, Part 9.
By Marc Esterer and Alexander Strulak
No ministry controls an entire sports system.
The national government may set strategy and provide funding. Municipalities operate facilities. Federations organize sports. Clubs deliver participation. Schools introduce children to movement. Universities develop knowledge. Healthcare providers keep athletes and citizens active. Companies contribute capital, technology and expertise. International organizations open access to standards, networks and competitions.
The result is structurally different from many other policy areas: sport is delivered through an ecosystem of organizations that often have different incentives, funding sources and decision rights.
That makes collaboration a capability in its own right. A strong national strategy can still fail if schools and clubs do not connect, if municipalities build infrastructure without federation input, if research remains inside universities, if companies are treated only as sponsors, or if international partnerships bring short-term opportunities without leaving capability behind.
The Netherlands provides perhaps the clearest example of collaboration being deliberately built into the operating model. Its national Sportakkoord links central government, municipalities, organized sport and commercial providers, while implementation happens largely through local agreements. Japan demonstrates another dimension: the government can create platforms that give companies a role beyond sponsorship and bring sports organizations together with other industries. Denmark shows how education, research and healthcare can become part of the athlete pathway rather than external support services. And the Dominican Republic’s baseball ecosystem illustrates both the extraordinary potential and the strategic questions created when international private actors become central to national talent development.
The maturity of ecosystem collaboration therefore comes down to four questions:
Are responsibilities, decision rights and incentives sufficiently clear for different stakeholders to deliver shared national objectives?
Does the private sector contribute capabilities, innovation and long-term resources, not simply sponsorship money?
Are education, research and healthcare institutions embedded into sports pathways rather than connected through isolated projects?
Do international partnerships transfer knowledge, capability and opportunity back into the domestic sports system?
Collaboration does not mean consensus on everything. It means that stakeholders understand who leads, who delivers, who funds, who supports and who is accountable.
Fragmentation is often treated as a structural problem.
A country has a ministry, an Olympic committee, dozens of federations, hundreds of local governments and thousands of clubs. The instinctive response is frequently to add another coordination committee.
But collaboration does not improve simply because more organizations sit around the same table. What matters is whether responsibilities connect: Who sets national priorities? Who finances them? Who translates them locally? Who supports clubs? Who owns facilities? Who coordinates with health and education? Who measures whether anything changed?
The Netherlands offers a particularly useful model because its sports system is highly decentralized, yet collaboration has been deliberately structured around that reality.
NOC*NSF currently represents 80 sports federations and 17 associated organizations, together covering around 21,700 sports clubs and 4.3 million organized participants. Around 2 million volunteers support Dutch clubs, demonstrating just how dependent the system is on organizations and people outside the government itself.
The national government therefore cannot simply command implementation. Instead, the Netherlands has built a coordination mechanism through the Sportakkoord.
Sportakkoord II, agreed in late 2022 and rolled out from 2023, formally brings together the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, NOC*NSF, the organizations representing municipalities, and the Platform Ondernemende Sportaanbieders representing commercial sports providers. Its three national ambitions are to strengthen the foundations of sport, increase reach and make the societal value of sport more visible.
The more interesting part is what happens below the national level. 342 municipalities participate, each developing its own local sport agreement and appointing a coordinator for sport and prevention. Local core teams manage implementation budgets and bring together municipalities, clubs, community organizations, companies and other relevant actors around local priorities.
National direction is therefore translated into local agreements rather than identical national programs. That distinction matters. The system provides a common strategic architecture without pretending that every local problem has the same solution. It also gives collaboration operational resources. Since April 2023, Sportakkoord services have supported more than 4,500 clubs and sports providers with organizational development and related support, through which some 60,000 trainers and referees have received training.
The Dutch model is not frictionless. Volunteer pressure, regulation and increasing professional requirements continue to challenge clubs. NOC*NSF reported in 2025 that roughly 90,000 volunteer board members help run Dutch clubs, while administrative complexity and governance responsibilities are increasing. That is precisely why collaboration matters.
A mature ecosystem does not assume that every organization can deliver every responsibility independently. It identifies where capabilities sit and deliberately connects them.
Sport has a long history of working with companies.
But sponsorship is the narrowest possible definition of private-sector collaboration. A company pays for rights. A sports organization provides visibility. Both parties measure commercial return. That relationship can be valuable, but it does not necessarily strengthen the sports system.
Private organizations can contribute much more: technology, distribution, healthcare, workplaces, data, infrastructure, expertise, innovation, customer access and capital.
The strategic question is therefore not simply: How much sponsorship does sport attract? It is: Which national sports problems could be solved better if private capabilities were deliberately brought into the system?
Japan provides a strong example of the government attempting to institutionalize this broader relationship. Its Sports Agency established the Sport in Life Consortium as an all-Japan platform bringing together municipalities, sports bodies, economic organizations, schools, healthcare and welfare institutions, companies and other organizations around the objective of making sport part of everyday life.
As of September 2026, the consortium had reached 5,862 participating organizations. The significance is not simply the number. Companies participate alongside organizations responsible for public policy, sport, education and health rather than being treated as an external sponsorship market. The government provides a framework through which consortium members can exchange knowledge, develop joint initiatives, receive support and participate in demonstration projects designed to increase sports participation.
Japan has extended the same collaboration principle into sports business development. Through the Sports Open Innovation Platform, the Sports Agency deliberately connects sports organizations with companies and technologies from other industries to create new products and businesses. Nine sports-industry collaboration projects were developed through the 2025 program, while the 2026 program seeks to support at least ten additional sports organizations with partner identification, mentoring and project development.
That represents an important shift. Instead of asking companies only to finance an existing sports product, the sports organization and the company can build something together.
The distinction could apply across a national system:
A technology company can improve facility access rather than simply sponsor a venue
A healthcare provider can support prevention and return-to-sport programs
An employer can create participation opportunities for working-age adults
A financial institution can develop funding solutions for clubs or infrastructure
A media company can help create new audiences
A consumer brand can provide distribution and engagement capability
A startup can solve an operational problem that a federation could not address internally
This does not mean every private partnership delivers public value automatically. Governments still need clear objectives and incentives.
A collaboration should answer: What capability does the partner bring? Which system outcome should improve? Who owns delivery? And what happens when the commercial agreement ends?
A mature sports ecosystem therefore distinguishes between sponsorship inventory and strategic partnership inventory. Both matter, but only the second asks how corporate capabilities can strengthen the system itself.
Sports organizations are often expected to solve problems they do not fully control.
A federation cannot determine a young athlete’s school timetable. A coach cannot provide specialist medical treatment. A national sports body cannot generate world-class research capability internally across physiology, psychology, nutrition, biomechanics and technology.
Yet all of those factors can determine whether athletes develop. The same principle applies to participation. Physical inactivity intersects with schools, healthcare, urban planning and social policy. Treating sport as an isolated sector therefore creates artificial boundaries around problems that do not respect them.
Denmark demonstrates how these boundaries can be deliberately bridged. Team Danmark currently works with 23 Elite Municipalities distributed across the country. The municipalities connect local clubs and federations with schools, upper-secondary education and higher-education institutions so young athletes can combine sporting development with education.
The model is built around the concept of a dual career. Instead of asking talented young athletes to choose between education and sport, institutions adapt schedules and study requirements so both pathways can continue. By late 2025, Team Danmark reported a network of 64 upper-secondary and vocational education partners, complemented by partnerships with universities and other higher-education institutions.
But the collaboration extends further. Team Danmark’s high-performance organization includes specialist capability across sports medicine, physiology, analysis, nutrition and psychology. Its healthcare team includes doctors, physiotherapists and massage therapists working through sports-medicine clinics in Brøndby and Aarhus.
Research is similarly connected to delivery. Team Danmark works with universities, hospitals and specialist institutions and has established six cross-institutional research networks focused on areas including elite sport environments, competition preparation, sports technology and early diagnostics. Research funding is explicitly expected to produce knowledge that can be translated into practical solutions for athletes and federations.
That last point is critical. Collaboration with a university is not mature simply because a memorandum of understanding exists. The knowledge has to travel:
The same should apply to healthcare:
And to education:
The maturity test should therefore look beyond the number of partnerships. Countries should ask whether institutional interfaces actually work: Can a school adapt around elite training? Can a physician access relevant athlete information? Can research findings change federation practice? Can universities use national performance problems to shape useful research questions? Can athletes move between those organizations without coordinating the entire system themselves?
Weak ecosystems leave athletes, families and coaches to navigate the gaps individually. Strong ones build these bridges before problems arise.
International collaboration is often measured through visibility.
A memorandum with another country. A foreign coach. A partnership with an international federation. A training camp abroad. An overseas club agreement. Those activities can create value. But the more important question is whether the relationship strengthens capability inside the country.
The Dominican Republic provides an unusually powerful example of what international sporting integration can become. Baseball connects the country directly to the world’s largest professional baseball league. All 30 Major League Baseball organizations operate academies in the Dominican Republic, creating a foreign-investment and player-development infrastructure on a scale few emerging sports markets can match. According to MLB figures cited by the Dominican foreign ministry in 2024, MLB-related annual investment in the country exceeds US$450 million, with approximately 500 Dominican players signed by MLB organizations each year.
The results at the top of the pathway are equally visible. On the 2025 MLB Opening Day rosters, 100 players born in the Dominican Republic were represented, the largest number from any country outside the United States.
The ecosystem reaches beyond MLB-owned facilities. The league’s Amateur Scouting League has involved more than 500 players from over 100 independent academies, connecting local trainers and prospects to scouting and technology available across MLB organizations.
International collaboration has therefore created infrastructure, professional expertise, scouting systems, employment and an extraordinary global pathway for Dominican baseball talent. But it also illustrates an important maturity question. The system is highly concentrated around one sport and one external commercial ecosystem. That does not make the model weak. It makes the next question more demanding: How much of the capability created by an international partnership becomes enduring national capability?
For the Dominican Republic, that could include coaching knowledge, education for young players, sports medicine, safeguarding, facility expertise, analytics, employment skills and management capability. The country has already begun formalizing parts of that relationship. For example, the Dominican foreign ministry and MLB signed an agreement in 2024 to facilitate consular processes for foreign personnel linked to the league’s academies, reflecting the degree to which baseball has become an institutional as well as commercial relationship.
Sports systems improve by learning from others. The objective is to move from accessing capability to absorbing capability. A strong partnership should leave something behind after the international partner leaves: better people, better processes, stronger institutions, new relationships or knowledge that can be reused.
International collaboration creates lasting value when imported expertise becomes domestic capability.
Vinciamo Sports
Power Insight.
The article series and engagement is led by Marc Esterer, Director Business Development, and Alexander Strulak, Strategic Partnerships Advisor & Communications Manager.
A note on process: AI tools were used to support the research and visualisation of the data presented.
Sources: NOC*NSF (current organization, membership, Dutch clubs and organized-sport figures; Sportakkoord support to clubs and sports providers); NOC*NSF / Sportakkoord (Sportakkoord II structure, national partners, participation of 342 municipalities and local coordination arrangements); Japan Sports Agency (Sport in Life Consortium and the Sports Open Innovation Platform); Team Danmark (Elite Municipalities, dual-career education partnerships, research networks and sports medicine); Dominican Republic Presidency / Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MLB academies, investment in the Dominican baseball ecosystem and the 2024 consular cooperation agreement); Major League Baseball (internationally born players on 2025 Opening Day rosters and the Amateur Scouting League).
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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