The organization of sporting events in Spain after the emergence of covid-19: the case of national and regional Federations

Abstract

The impact of Covid-19 worldwide is no longer in doubt. A global pandemic as never before experienced with consequences in all sectors of all countries. Not only the economy, tourism, transport, health or education, but also, for example, public activities such as sports. In the case of Spain, we are talking about an industry, sports in all its aspects that, in 2018, generated the equivalent of 3.3% of the Spanish GDP and in 2020 accused losses of 4600 million euros and a fall in revenue of 38% according to the Report presented by the Spanish Superior Sports Council in June 2020. How national and regional sports federations handled this situation from a sporting, communicative and media point of view is one of the objectives of this research.

For this purpose, we chose a mixed methodology combining interview and questionnaire to ask large (with more than 70,000 members), medium (between 10,000 and 70,000) and small (up to 10,000 members) federations how they dealt with this changing situation in which, after the total closure of venues and cancellation of events, the legislative and regulatory landscape changed week by week depending on the pandemic and the place in the peninsula where we were. In addition, the reality, means and resources were not the same for national and regional federations.

The use of social networks, the online broadcasting of content or the planning and development of streaming events through social networks, the holding of virtual or mixed championships through multisport platforms that were beginning to consolidate in Spain received a definitive boost, as well as the development of e-sports, "the cybersports world came to stay and evolve and a good example of this was the Tokyo Olympic Games, followed worldwide on television, even for the locals" (Galindo Cáceres, 2022). The federations had to relocate and change the way of communicating with their members, even in some cases hiring personnel to manage the networks, facing the loss of sponsorship and aid from different entities and the pressure from the media requesting content to fill their spaces, given that the suspension of championships left many "empty hours" in the sports spaces of the major media.

Both national and regional federations confirmed that the legislation was too restrictive when it came to developing tournaments or championships, although the classification of high or low risk sports activities, depending on the possibility of contagion between athletes depending on the physical contact between them being greater or lesser, made it possible for some federations to continue developing activities only in person, such as the Royal Galician Archery Federation. The prioritization of tournaments in certain categories, the priority use of Facebook, Twiter and Youtube as communication channels and the forecast that the return to normality will bring full presentiality back to the fields and training areas are some of the results that we can find in this work.