Abstract
Sports clubs claim to fulfil several important socio-political functions and therefore to play an important role in public welfare for European contemporary societies. This significance is mainly based on the considerable size and voluntary character of the club-organised sports sector. In almost all European countries, sports clubs are valuable sports providers, playing a crucial role in regular sports activity, particularly for youth and competitive sports. In the main, sports clubs offer a setting for regular and well-organised sports activities characterised by conviviality and togetherness. This book investigates the contribution of sports clubs to public welfare using the broad range of empirical data collected within the framework of a comparative study. The project “Social Inclusion and Volunteering in Sports Clubs in Europe” (SIVSCE) collected comparable data at various analytical levels across ten European countries. The overarching concern of this book is to analyse and compare the extent sports clubs can contribute to health promotion, social cohesion and democratic participation through volunteering and therefore promote public welfare in European societies. In the introduction, we provide a background and give an overview of the structure of the ten country-specific chapters and two comparative chapters contained in this book.
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Nagel, S., Elmose-Østerlund, K., Ibsen, B., Scheerder, J. (2020). Introduction. In: Nagel, S., Elmose-Østerlund, K., Ibsen, B., Scheerder, J. (eds) Functions of Sports Clubs in European Societies . Sports Economics, Management and Policy, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48535-1_1
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