Veerle De Bosscher

• Professor
• Professor (Associate) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Studies have demonstrated the potential positive (e.g., inclusion) and negative (e.g., pollution) outcomes that elite sport has on society. Over the years, the interest in measuring these societal outcomes has grown. This research extends previous studies that emphasize the need for a validated scale to accurately measure public perceptions of elit...

This article examines sport/discipline-specific market concentrations in the context of the eight Summer Olympic Games held between 1992 and 2020. Three market concentration-related debates underpin this study: (1) the number of competing firms; (2) market size; and (3) time. A normalized version of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHIN) is calculat...

Talent development models are the frameworks that guide sports stakeholders in developing potential athletes, within which early specialisation and diversification remain contradictory strategies. This paper presents new insights into the starting and specialisation ages of world-class athletes in various Olympic sports. A total of 2,838 athletes f...

Talent development models are the frameworks that guide sports stakeholders in developing potential athletes, within which early specialisation and diversification remain contradictory strategies. This paper presents new insights into the starting and specialisation ages of world-class athletes in various Olympic sports. A total of 2,838 athletes f...

The Paralympics Games are increasing in competitiveness as more countries seek top medal outcomes. In response, governments are focusing on the development and implementation of effective national sport policies/systems to optimise Paralympic success. However, little is known about national sport policy influencing a country’s Paralympic success. I...

The importance of contexts in analysing elite sport systems and policies, as reflected in substantial research over the past couple of decades, is considered to nurture or constrain the development and outcome of elite sport systems toward international sporting success. Theorising elite sport systems as institutions operating and embedded in an op...

Background: The influence of the socioeconomic variables in the sporting success has been frequently presented in the literature. However, most of the studies on this topic have joined them all excluding the specificities of each sport. Problem and Aim: Analyzing the influence of socioeconomic and historical results of past World Championships and...

Regular involvement in organised youth sport boosts the likelihood of lifelong sport participation. However, increasing dropout rates in sport clubs and alarming levels of young people not meeting physical activity guidelines may suggest that the organised sport sector’s efforts have been insufficient to date. This situation calls for evaluation of...

A growing number of nations have started to invest in high-performance sport, which has resulted in an intensifying 'global sporting arms race'. As a result, it is expected that nations will face higher costs to maintain or increase success in the future. In this chapter, we review literature on high-performance systems to identify key characterist...

In the run up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games held in 2021, the SPLISS consortium invited nations with an interest in elite sport development systems to take part in an exercise to quantify their nationally coordinated expenditure on elite sport. Finance is Pillar 1 of the SPLISS conceptual model of an elite sport development system...

The impact of the COVID-19 crisis and its related measures on how people practice and experience leisure continues to be significant. In the current study, a survey measuring sport participation during the third week of the first lockdown, that started on the 18th of March 2020 and has been gradually loosened as of the 18th of April 2020, was carri...

The literature suggests that the current athlete development models do not reflect the multifaceted developmental pathways in Paralympic sport. This study aimed to analyze how parasport athletes progress through developmental phases of an athletic career pathway by comparing differences in their trajectories based on the nature of the impairment (a...

Research question Due to government restrictions because of COVID-19, all participatory sport events (PSEs) were cancelled. As a result, knowledge is needed as to how and to what extent participants of PSEs modified their sport behaviour to fill the void of event cancellation. Therefore, this study aimed to (1) investigate to what extent event part...

As nations are increasingly investing large amounts of public money in elite sport development, policy makers often claim that elite sport will not only lead to more medals, but it will also trigger a range of wider societal outcomes. This point is clearly illustrated by the high-performance directors who were interviewed for this introduction. Not...

Elite sporting systems are often descriptions of established practices with little regard for national contexts. This paper examined the influence of contextual factors on the elite sporting system of South-Africa. The contextual factors were evaluated through the lens of systems theory (Components: Economic, social, political, legal, and technolog...

Research question This study aims to better understand and conceptualise the dynamics of inspirational elite sport. Specifically, taking Belgian hockey as a case study, this article is concerned with understanding how, why, and under what circumstances elite sport influences grassroots sport participation in voluntary sports clubs (i.e. trickle-dow...

Inter-organisational relationships between governmental stakeholders are critically important in the implementation of elite sport policies. However, these relationships are often compounded by varying challenges, which can cause a stagnation of elite sport policies and its systems. This study evaluated the perceptions of the inter-organisational p...

Overal ter wereld implemente(e)r(d)en landen lockdowns om de covid-19-pandemie te bestrijden. Terwijl deze lockdowns de vrije bewegingsruimte van mensen sterk inperken, wijzen experten er tegelijkertijd op dat mensen op een veilige manier fysiek actief moeten blijven om andere gezondheidsproblemen te voorkomen. Op basis van een online bevraging ana...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate coaches' views on developing leadership and shared leadership capacity in particular in competitive youth football. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative examination focusses on the leadership philosophy of ten male coaches at the sub-elite competitive level in youth football in The Nether...

The aim of this research was to explore at what age professional tennis players at different ranking levels (top 10, 11-20, 21–50, 51–100, 101–200, 201–300) started playing tennis and had achieved their career ranking milestones, and to explore the viability of using age and ranking to predict a player’s future success. 373 top 300 ranked professio...

The way disability is understood and positioned by key stakeholders informs how policies are implemented in the development of pathways to sporting excellence of an athlete with a disability. In this paper, the authors seek to identify which sports policy factors and stakeholders influence the development of athletic career pathways in Paralympic s...

Athlete development in parasport is a complex domain. Evidence on the developmental trajectories of para-athletes is necessary to examine the critical determinants of specific para-athlete development models. Underpinned by the existing athlete development models to gather insights into the different developmental phases, this study explored how at...

Countries all over the world implemented lockdowns to counteract COVID-19. These lockdowns heavily limited people's exercise possibilities. At the same time, experts advocated to remain physically active to prevent future health problems. Based on an online survey, this study examines adults' exercise levels and patterns during the COVID-19 lockdow...

Research question: As sports are different by nature, can their respective specificities influence their systems? This research offer insight into sport policies and systems at a sport-specific level. Research methods: To identify the organisational factors, we interviewed 33 Olympic judo experts. The study employed content analysis with a deductiv...

https://saso.research.vub.be/sporten-in-tijden-van-crisis-profiel-van-de-corona-sporter

Shared leadership is described as the dynamic process of distributing leadership influence across multiple team members. It is viewed as an effective form of management to deal with increased complexity in youth team sport. However, literature on youth leadership development and reliable and valid measures to assess shared leadership in youth sport...

Since the turn of the century, public investments in high performance sport are booming which requires policy makers to justify the expenses. Thus, governments predominantly argue that elite sport will trigger a range of benefits for the population. The latter is contested among academics as there is lack of robust evidence that supports the govern...

This paper aimed to analyse the relationships between the availability of academic dual career support services, the level of education and the level of international sporting success achieved by elite athletes. The study was conducted with 2160 elite athletes from 13 nations, who answered a standardized survey. Descriptive and correlation analyses...

Many Nations are increasingly investing public money in elite sport on the belief that this will trigger a range of benefits for the population. However, there is lack of insight into how the population perceives elite sport’s impact on society. This study developed and tested a measurement scale assessing the publics’ beliefs of the positive and n...

Despite the evidence of nations investing strategically into their elite sport systems to produce Olympic success, there is a lack of knowledge on how national-level decision-makers can employ a strategy to analyse the competitive environment concerning sports contested in the Olympic Winter Games. In this paper, the concept of market potential ana...

Les gouvernements nationaux cherchent des moyens efficaces pour améliorer leurs résultats lors des manifestations sportives internationales telles que les Jeux olympiques. Le projet SPLISS 2.0 (Sport Policy factors leading to International Sporting Success) a observé une grande diversité entre les systèmes de politique du sport d'élite de seize nat...

This study presents an application of the contingent valuation method for valuing medal winning success on a transnational basis to test whether more medals won equates to more utility. To achieve this aim, a research project was set up in five countries: Belgium, Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Respondents were asked to st...

Contextual factors are fundamental but often overlooked elements of parasport that can introduce various complexities within the parasport system. The purpose of this paper is to identify and categorize contextual factors that influence the parasport system and to examine the extent to which these factors influence the development of para-athletes’...

Recent scandals across the word of sport can be directly related to poor governance. This Research Handbook gathers the state-of-the-art research on sport governance by leading international scholars on various issues across various sports, offering a vital reference point for advancing research. Illustrating different approaches and perspectives...

When nations face the challenge of justifying their elite sport development policies, they tend to state that a wide range of societal benefits will ‘trickle down’. This argument, however, is being criticised by academics who claim that there is a lack of empirical evidence for the way elite sport influences society. In light of the uncertain/unpro...

Purpose Since the 1990s, the International Olympic Committee has offered nations more medal-winning opportunities at every Winter Games. Meanwhile, many countries are constrained by their limited financial resources to target sports strategically. The purpose of this paper is to examine the targeting approaches to Olympic Winter Sports of National...

This article examines competitive balance at the Summer Olympic Games between 1992 and 2016 by measuring the distribution of gold medals, medals and medal points among nations. The analysis differentiates between all competitions, and competitions for male and female athletes. Five competitive balance-related performance indicators were used-a norm...

The aim of this paper is to provide a complete understanding of the sport policies in South Africa (SA) with regard to mass sport for recreation involvement, and the elite sporting system created to develop high performance athletes. In the subsequent sections, various specific contextual factors will first be defined which may influence the sport...

In hoofdstuk 7 worden de topsportprestaties geanalyseerd in het licht van het mape-model. De volgende redenering is hierbij leidend: overheid en sportorganisaties investeren in topsport vanwege de maatschappelijke betekenissen en publieke waarde daarvan. De uitgaven aan topsport uit collectieve middelen moeten leiden tot maatschappelijke betekeniss...

In this article, the authors examine interorganisational conflict between provincial and national sport organisations in China. The authors theoretically ground the research in work related to interorganisational relationships and interorganisational conflict. The three case studies are artistic gymnastics, swimming, and cycling, and the authors co...

Learning from the career trajectories of the most successful elite players is central to informing effective strategies and long-term career planning to maximise player development and performance. This article examined the junior competition results and the performing age at major career milestones of top-level professional tennis players, utilisi...

Research question: This paper explores the extent to which nations prioritise elite sport funding; whether such nations are more successful than those whose funding is more diversified; and, if the sports that receive the most funding are also the most successful. Research methods: Data on public expenditure for elite sport programmes (2011/2012) w...

The fact that international sporting performance is associated with socioeconomic indicators such as population size and GDP per capita has been widely shown. The correlation between sporting performance and national sport policy factors was also observed in the SPLISS project (Sports Policy factors Leading to International Sporting Success). In th...

Parasport is a growing field of study with many countries recognising the need to develop organisational structures in order to optimise the development of high-performance sport opportunities for Paralympic athletes. Policy development in this area is currently still under developed and a significant knowledge gap is apparent regarding the develop...

Currently in the literature, there is a dearth of empirical research that confirms whether international junior success is a reliable predictor for future international senior success. Despite the uncertainty of the junior–senior relationship, federations and coaches still tend to use junior success as a predictor for long-term senior success. A ra...

Competitive balance is important because it enhances outcome uncertainty and therefore it promotes spectator interest, and encourages government investment in a sport. This article analyses the distribution of gold medals, medals, medal points and top eight points amongst nations in table tennis from 1988 to 2016 at the Olympic Games and the World...

Research question: Despite the attention the Olympic Winter Games has received by scholars, there has been little theoretically informed analysis on the positioning of nations in a dynamic environment. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how nations position themselves in the Winter Games by comparing national funding prioritisations of Olympic...

Research question: Due to increasing competition, national governing bodies (NGBs) are put under pressure to deliver collective success and develop talent programmes for their athletes at an increasingly young age. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the talent development literature from an organisational perspective. It addresses the follo...

Since the early 1990s, competition in the Olympic Winter Games has changed notably in terms of events contested and nations taking part. Despite, these changes, which are overseen by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the number of medal-winning nations has remained relatively stable. As a first attempt to illustrate this issue on a discipl...

This study is based on a detailed international comparison of the elite sport policies of 15 nations as part of the SPLISS (Sports Policy Factors Leading to International Sporting Success) study. It aims to provide deeper insights into the phenomena of convergence and divergence of elite sport policies. The research uses a mixed methods approach ba...

Previous studies acknowledge the importance of sporting organizations' developing partnerships with clubs for athlete development purposes. However, there are no studies that address the way partnerships influence athlete progression and pathways. This study explores interorganizational relationships (IORs) between a tennis federation and tennis cl...

Research on elite sport policy tends to focus on the policy factors that can influence success. Even though policies drive the management of organizational resources, the organizational capacity of countries in specific sports to allocate resources remains unclear. This paper identifies and evaluates the organizational capacity of five sport system...

This paper discusses the utility of mixed methods research in international comparative studies on elite sport policies and (quantitative) composite indicators (CIs) in particular. It illustrates how complex and large amounts of data in 15 nations have been objectified into easily understood formats, CIs. Using a nine Pillar model, data were collec...

While most research on elite sport success focuses on sport policy factors or the explanatory powers of macro-level factors such as wealth and population, sporting success of countries is also determined by the competitive environment of a sport. This paper identified trends in competitive balance in athletics at world championships and Olympic Gam...

The increasing demands of elite sports make it difficult for talented young athletes to balance school and sport. This paper investigates the multi-dimensional policy effectiveness of elite sport schools (ESSs) in secondary education in Flanders. Four hundred and eight elite athletes who graduated from an ESS, and 341 from mainstream schools, compl...

Talent identification at a young age is deemed essential for many national sporting organisations to increase the chances of success for their players on the international stage. Talent identification methods can be imprecise and national tennis associations and coaches often identify talent based on performances at youth tournaments and junior ran...

Many governments use the trickle-down or demonstration effect to justify their high investments in elite sport. The assumption is that elite athlete success increases mass participation. Evidence of a relationship between elite success and mass participation is fragmented and previous studies have mostly failed to demonstrate a connection. Neverthe...

Research question: Considering the current upward trend of public investment in elite sport, the importance of the public's acceptance cannot be ignored; however, little has been reported on the public's attitude towards elite sport policy. The present study seeks to answer the following research question: What are the significant socio-psychologic...

Research question: The research questions that guided this investigation were (1) ‘What are the roles of sport development stakeholders in elite player development pathways?’ and (2) ‘How are those elite pathways modelled in tennis?’ Research methods: Data from 18 semi-structured in-depth interviews with international tennis experts were thematical...

An examination of high-performance development studies reveals that a growing amount of research points to a divergence of elite sport policies among different sports or nations. At a sport-specific level, previous studies have identified crucial organisational resources within clubs, leagues or sports, but there is no method to evaluate countries’...

Nederlandse topsportbeleid scoort op planning en coordinatie Uit een internationale vergelijking blijkt dat het Nederlandse topsportbeleid in 2011/’12 goed scoort ten opzichte van andere landen op terreinen waar langetermijnplanning en coördinatie belangrijk zijn, zoals sportparticipatie en de organisatie en structuur van de topsport. Op terreinen...

Brazil is one of the countries that has invested more in high performance sport; the ultimate goal of this nation is to win about 30 medals in the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympic Games in 2016. The aims of this study were to present the structure of the Brazilian sport policies and the quality of actions in high performance sport policies. The action...

Over the past two decades, the power struggle between nations to win medals in major competitions, especially the Olympic Games has intensified. This has led to increasing competition in international sports with extensive investment by sports governments through funding and national lottery funding. As the supply of medals (success) remains essent...

The global sporting arms race has encouraged nations to adopt a more strategic elite sport policy. Consequently, in their quest for international success in a globalizing world, the elite sport systems of leading nations have become increasingly homogeneous (e.g., Bergsgard, et al., 2007; De Bosscher et al., 2008; Digel, Burk, & Fahrner, 2006; Gree...

This book deals with the strategic policy planning process that underpins the development of successful national elite sport development systems. Drawing on various international competitiveness studies, it examines how nations develop and implement policies that are based on the critical success factors that may lead to competitive advantage in wo...

How can nations improve their chances of winning medals in international sport? This book deals with the strategic policy planning process that underpins the development of successful national elite sport development systems. Drawing on various international competitiveness studies, it examines how nations develop and implement policies that are ba...

How can nations improve their chances of winning medals in international sport? This book deals with the strategic policy planning process that underpins the development of successful national elite sport development systems. Drawing on various international competitiveness studies, it examines how nations develop and implement policies that are ba...

How can nations improve their chances of winning medals in international sport? This book deals with the strategic policy planning process that underpins the development of successful national elite sport development systems. Drawing on various international competitiveness studies, it examines how nations develop and implement policies that are ba...

How can nations improve their chances of winning medals in international sport? This book deals with the strategic policy planning process that underpins the development of successful national elite sport development systems. Drawing on various international competitiveness studies, it examines how nations develop and implement policies that are ba...

How can nations improve their chances of winning medals in international sport? This book deals with the strategic policy planning process that underpins the development of successful national elite sport development systems. Drawing on various international competitiveness studies, it examines how nations develop and implement policies that are ba...

How can nations improve their chances of winning medals in international sport? This book deals with the strategic policy planning process that underpins the development of successful national elite sport development systems. Drawing on various international competitiveness studies, it examines how nations develop and implement policies that are ba...

How can nations improve their chances of winning medals in international sport? This book deals with the strategic policy planning process that underpins the development of successful national elite sport development systems. Drawing on various international competitiveness studies, it examines how nations develop and implement policies that are ba...

How can nations improve their chances of winning medals in international sport? This book deals with the strategic policy planning process that underpins the development of successful national elite sport development systems. Drawing on various international competitiveness studies, it examines how nations develop and implement policies that are ba...