Designing a performance measurement framework for regional networks of national sports organizations: evidence from Russian football

ABSTRACT

With Russia being the biggest country in the world in terms of covered land territory, it is extremely difficult for local national sports organizations (NSO) to guide their development policy and the Football Union of Russia is no exclusion. By proposing a performance measurement system, this paper provides a framework for coordinating regional networks based on various football development patterns. Five performance dimensions relevant to the Russian context were chosen: player development, elite sport, grassroots, infrastructure and development & promotion activities. Building on the theoretical findings of previous studies on deriving performance clusters of NSOs, this paper also introduces a mapping procedure, which helps visualize the potential football development networks as well as provides recommendations on how to better coordinate their activities within a country. The findings of the paper indicate that several regions directly involved in staging FIFA 2018 World Cup matches seem to show insufficient football development performance and risk dealing with “white elephants”.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance measurement
• national sports organization
• network approach
• football development
• 2018 FIFA World Cup

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to the representatives of the Football Union of Russia and the interregional football associations of Russia for participating in this research as experts and the CEO of the National Rating Agency, Mr. Viktor Chetverikov, for providing valuable insights and productive discussions on the rating methodology. Sincere gratitude goes to Alan Moore for proofreading. A great deal of thanks goes to the two anonymous reviewers who helped improve the narrative and the structure of the paper as well pushing it to be both theoretically sound and relevant for practitioners.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.