Efficiency and Fairness in Financing Slovak National Sports Associations

Abstract National sports associations are private-sector sports organisations with an exclusive, monopoly position for a particular type of sport within individual countries. This monopoly position is done by the internal regulations of international sports associations, of which only one entity for a given country can become a member, which its country represents at the international level. The legislation of individual countries also regulates National sports associations. The main aim of this contribution is to assess and benchmark the technical efficiency of 70 sports associations offering their services in Slovakia by a set of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models and to consider fairness in the financing of Slovak national sports associations. It is important to note that all models used have different premises in their modelling, each of them solves optimisation problems of real live under specific conditions. The arguments for evaluating fairness in financing are based on the methodology of the breakdown of financial subsidies for sport and on controlled interviews with experts of the state administration and national sports associations. Based on our analysis, we can state that the system of financing Slovak national sports associations is neither efficient nor fair in the redistribution of public funds from the point of view of meeting the goals of public policy in the field of sport. The outcome of the research may be of interest to regulatory institutions, as well as to the management of individual national sports associations.