Guided by the EU Work Plan for Sport 2021-2024, the three-year EU project on statistics and harmonisation of sports policies has resulted in the report ‘Supporting the development of harmonised sports statistics in the EU’, published on Wednesday 16 July by the European Commission.
The aim of the project, which was to provide a better framework for the production of sports data, to support national satellite accounts - sport satellite accounts (SSA), statistical tools for estimating the economic contribution of sport - and to support public policies in the social, economic and health fields, was to establish a common definition of sport at European level.
The latter makes it possible to contribute to the construction of harmonised statistical tools among the Member States and to the development of policies based on comparable data.
The project, to be carried out between 2022 and 2024, will rethink the Vilnius Definition of Sport (https://aeur.eu/f/i0d ), previously used as a reference for the sport satellite accounts, to come up with a new definition that more clearly distinguishes between sporting activities and the goods and services associated with them, such as equipment or emerging practices, including e-sport.
This is in line with the European nomenclatures in force (in particular the NACE nomenclature for activities and the CPA nomenclature for products), so that the data can be read in a harmonised way throughout the EU.
This work is in line with a European ambition to eventually create a European satellite account for sport.
It has already made it possible to test a simplified data collection model in Poland and Italy, and to contribute to discussions on the evaluation of physical participation, public health and the socio-economic impact of sport.
The report therefore recommends that a steering group be set up this year to coordinate the monitoring of participation in sport across the EU, with a view to implementation by 2027 and, in a way, responding to the EU’s desire to enhance the role of sport in a range of policies such as health, social inclusion, employment and education.
Read the report: https://aeur.eu/f/i0c (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)