Dr Emmanuel Bayle is a Professor in Sports Management at the Institute of Sport Sciences of the University of Lausanne. Previously, he was a Professor in Strategic Management and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at the Business School of the University of Lyon. He is an expert in governance, management and performance around Olympic sport organisations.

Governance, regulation and management of global sport organisations

In this talk, Professor Bayle analyses and criticizes the new governance principles the International Olympic Committee has adopted since Thomas Bach was elected president in 2013, at which point he faced a legitimacy crisis in what had become a more complex global sport world. Bayle demonstrates that Bach’s strategy since he became IOC president can be considered a form of realpolitik based on careful assessment of the forces in play and deft risk management. His approach is based on two pillars whose foundations are open to question and critics: ‘responsible autonomy through good governance’ and the claim that sport and Olympism have a positive impact on society. Bayle also discusses the challenges linked to the Ukrainian war for Olympic system and the IOC. If Bach has tried to assert leadership of the IOC on world sport, the reality is that this international sport world is fragmented. This underscores why Professor Bayle has designed a framework to understand the regulation of international sport. It is based on an analysis of each sport’s global ecosystem, conducted to identify the actors involved, as well as their respective weights, objectives (for-profit/nonprofit), relationships, and roles. The underlying thesis is that actors within or outside the ecosystem activate four areas of regulation (social, economic, legal, political) and mobilise appropriate competencies to create, strengthen, or destabilise specific regulation modes or configurations. Applying this analysis framework revealed five configurations of sport regulation: regulation by a dominant International sport Federation (IF); regulation coordinated by an IF; parallel regulation; commercial regulation supplanting an IF; commercial regulation with no IF. These categories explain the relative power of the actors involved and the way they use their social, economic, legal, and political regulation competencies, which depend on their circumstances, to further their interests.