--- title: "Conflicts of Interest in Grassroots Sport: The Dilemmas Nobody Talks About" url: https://tidyhq.com/blog/conflicts-of-interest-grassroots-sport date: 2026-06-18 updated: 2026-04-20 author: "Isaak Dury" categories: ["Governance", "Thought Leadership"] excerpt: "Your treasurer's husband wants to bid on the clubhouse renovation. Your board member just got VIP tickets from a sponsor. These aren't hypothetical." --- # Conflicts of Interest in Grassroots Sport: The Dilemmas Nobody Talks About > Your treasurer's husband wants to bid on the clubhouse renovation. Your board member just got VIP tickets from a sponsor. These aren't hypothetical. ![The Gothic IV by Judith Rothschild, illustrating Conflicts of Interest in Grassroots Sport: The Dilemmas Nobody Talks About](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/bp0k7h82/production/81ca310afb8737a8265a16845a447e91e73b91a5-843x1037.jpg?w=1200&fm=webp) ## Key takeaways - Conflicts of interest in grassroots sport are rarely about corruption - they're about proximity, relationships, and dual roles that nobody planned for - Transparency International defines corruption as 'misuse of entrusted power for personal gain' - and that applies at committee level, not just at FIFA - Every conflict situation should be assessed on three axes: the persons involved, the situation, and the intentions - The fix isn't eliminating conflicts - it's disclosure, documentation, and abstention from affected decisions - Audit trails and conflict registers make the difference between a governance culture and a governance crisis A committee member's husband runs a construction company\. The club needs its changerooms renovated\. He submits a quote\. It's competitive\. The work would be good\. Everyone knows him\. Nobody says anything\. Is that a conflict of interest? Obviously\. But here's why it goes unaddressed at most clubs: nobody on the committee thinks of themselves as corrupt\. They're volunteers\. They're giving up their evenings\. The husband's quote is genuinely fair\. And the alternative \- going through a formal tender process for a $40,000 job at a community football club \- feels absurd\. This is the heart of the problem\. Conflicts of interest in grassroots sport almost never look like corruption\. They look like convenience\. ## What we're actually talking about [Transparency International](https://www.transparency.org/en/) defines corruption as "the misuse of entrusted power for personal gain\." That definition was written for governments and corporations, but it applies with uncomfortable precision to volunteer sport committees\. Committee members hold entrusted power\. They make decisions about money, contracts, employment, and member welfare\. When those decisions intersect with personal interests \- even innocently \- you have a conflict\. The [ISCA](https://www.isca-web.org/) and Transparency International Germany published guidelines on this through the [Good Governance in Grassroots Sport project](https://goodgovsport.eu/), supported by the European Commission\. Their framework distinguishes between two things that often get conflated\. **Conflicts of interest** happen when a person's private interests compete with their organisational responsibilities\. The treasurer whose spouse bids on the renovation contract\. The president who also sits on the board of a company that supplies equipment to the club\. The committee member who coaches at a rival club\. **Undue advantages** are broader than most people realise\. We tend to think of bribery \- cash in envelopes\. But the ISCA guidelines define undue advantages as encompassing gifts, discounts, VIP tickets, travel, honorary memberships, and preferential treatment of any kind\. The sponsor who offers the board free hospitality box tickets for the grand final\. The equipment supplier who gives the president a personal discount\. The local council officer who fast\-tracks a club's venue booking because their kid plays there\. None of these are criminal\. Most aren't even unethical in isolation\. But they create obligations \- felt or real \- that distort decision\-making\. And in grassroots sport, where relationships are tight and roles overlap, these situations are everywhere\. ## The dilemmas that actually happen Prof\. Antonio Borgogni and colleagues at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio developed a set of dilemma cases for the Good Governance project\. They're useful because they don't have clean answers\. Real governance situations rarely do\. **The renovation bid\.** A board member's husband owns a building company\. He submits a bid for renovating the clubhouse\. His price is competitive\. The quality of his previous work is known\. The board member insists she can be impartial\. What do you do? The answer isn't "reject the bid\." The answer is: the board member declares the conflict, leaves the room during discussion and vote, the declaration is recorded in the minutes, and the remaining committee evaluates the bid on its merits\. The bid might still win\. That's fine\. The process is what matters\. **The coaching hire\.** A board member's niece applies for a paid coaching position at the club\. She's qualified\. There are other qualified applicants\. The board member sits on the selection panel\. Same principle\. The board member should not be on the panel\. Full stop\. But at a small club with a five\-person committee, removing one person from a hiring decision can feel impractical\. That's exactly when documentation matters most \- when the club is too small for the conflict to be structurally avoided\. **The bank employee\.** A board member works at the bank where the club holds its accounts\. Through their role, they have access to the club's financial information outside of what's shared in treasurer reports\. Is that a conflict? It is\. Not because they'll do anything wrong, but because they have information asymmetry that other board members don't\. The ISCA guidelines are clear: it's the structural position that creates the conflict, not the person's intentions\. **The sponsor's hospitality\.** A major sponsor invites the entire board to their corporate box for a state\-level final\. It's a generous gesture\. It builds the relationship\. It also means the board, who will later decide whether to renew the sponsorship, have received a material benefit from one of the bidders\. This is the most common scenario in grassroots sport and the one most consistently ignored\. Borgogni's point about these dilemmas is that "each case has to be assessed in its specific context\." There's no universal rule that says you can't accept hospitality from a sponsor\. But there should be a policy that says you disclose it, and that disclosure is documented\. **The dual\-role president\.** The president of a regional sporting association is also the CEO of a company that provides coaching education services\. The association is considering making coaching accreditation mandatory for all affiliated clubs\. The president's company would benefit financially from this decision\. This one is genuinely difficult\. The president may be the most knowledgeable person in the room about coaching standards\. Their expertise is why they were elected\. But their financial interest in the outcome is real\. The ISCA framework says you assess three things: the persons involved \(who has the conflict\), the situation \(what decision is being made\), and the intentions \(is there evidence of self\-serving behaviour\)\. Even without bad intentions, the structural conflict requires disclosure and likely abstention\. ## Why most clubs handle this badly The reason isn't moral failure\. It's structural\. Most community sport clubs don't have a conflict of interest policy\. They don't have a register of interests\. Committee minutes \- if they exist at all \- don't record who declared what, who left the room, or how a conflicted decision was handled\. And because everyone is a volunteer, there's an unspoken reluctance to challenge anyone's integrity\. Raising a conflict of interest feels like an accusation\. "Are you saying I can't be fair?" The social cost of raising it is high\. The perceived risk of ignoring it is low \- until something goes wrong\. The ISCA guidelines make a useful distinction here\. A conflict of interest is not an accusation of wrongdoing\. It's a structural condition\. It exists regardless of whether the person involved is trustworthy\. The point of declaring it isn't to question someone's character\. It's to protect them \- and the organisation \- from the appearance of impropriety\. That shift in framing matters\. When a club treats conflicts of interest as protective rather than accusatory, committee members are more willing to self\-declare\. ## What a proper policy looks like It doesn't need to be long\. It needs four elements\. **Disclosure\.** Every committee member declares their interests \- financial relationships, family connections, dual roles, employment that could intersect with club decisions\. This happens annually and whenever a new conflict arises\. **Documentation\.** Declarations go in a register\. The register is accessible to the committee \(not necessarily to all members, but to the governance body\)\. It's updated, not filed and forgotten\. **Abstention\.** When a declared interest is relevant to a specific decision, the conflicted person leaves the room\. They don't participate in discussion\. They don't vote\. This is recorded in the minutes\. **Review\.** The register and the process are reviewed annually\. New committee members are inducted into the policy\. Departing members' declarations are archived\. That's it\. No lawyers required\. No 40\-page policy document\. Just a culture of disclosure, a place to record it, and a clear expectation about what happens when a conflict is relevant\. ## The technology gap Here's where most clubs fall down in practice\. They might agree to all of this in principle\. They might even pass a motion at an AGM adopting a conflict of interest policy\. But then: where does the register live? Who maintains it? How do you prove, two years later, that a board member declared their interest before a vote? Paper minutes get lost\. Email trails get deleted\. Spreadsheets sit on someone's personal laptop\. The institutional memory of how a decision was made \- who was in the room, who wasn't, what was declared \- evaporates when the committee turns over\. This is where governance technology earns its keep\. Platforms like [TidyConnect](/connect) give governing bodies and clubs a place to maintain conflict of interest registers with audit trails, record committee decisions with documented attendees and abstentions, and distribute policies with acknowledgement tracking\. When a governing body needs to demonstrate that its clubs are managing conflicts properly \- to a funder, an insurer, or a regulator \- the evidence exists\. It's timestamped\. It's not on someone's laptop\. But the technology only works if the culture exists first\. A conflict register in a system nobody uses is no better than a policy nobody reads\. ## The real question Sylvia Schenk of Transparency International Germany has spent years working on integrity in sport governance\. Her work with ISCA on the [Good Governance in Grassroots Sport project](https://goodgovsport.eu/) makes a point that applies directly to every club committee in the country: the question isn't whether conflicts of interest exist\. They always will, in any organisation where people know each other and have overlapping roles\. The question is whether your organisation has a way to surface them, document them, and make decisions transparently despite them\. Most clubs don't\. Not because they're corrupt\. Because nobody ever set up the process\. That's fixable\. And it starts with a conversation \- not about ethics in the abstract, but about the specific, real, uncomfortable situations that every committee eventually faces\. The husband's construction company\. The niece's coaching application\. The sponsor's hospitality box\. Name them\. Document them\. Decide how you'll handle them before they happen\. That's governance\. ## References - ISCA & Transparency International Germany\. [Guidelines for Good Governance in Grassroots Sport](https://www.isca-web.org/files/GGGS_Web/Guidelines_for_Good_Governance_in_Grassroots_Sport.pdf) \(PDF\)\. Chapters 7 and 9\. - Transparency International\. [What Is Corruption?](https://www.transparency.org/en/)\. Definition: misuse of entrusted power for personal gain\. - UK Government\. [Bribery Act 2010](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/23/contents)\. - UK Charity Commission\. [Charity Commission](https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/charity-commission)\. Conflict of interest guidance\. - OECD\. [Anti\-Bribery and Corruption](https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/anti-bribery-and-corruption.html)\. - UNODC\. [UN Convention against Corruption](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/corruption/uncac.html)\. --- Header image: *The Gothic IV* by Judith Rothschild, via [Art Institute of Chicago](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/263699) --- Canonical: https://tidyhq.com/blog/conflicts-of-interest-grassroots-sport | Retrieved from: https://tidyhq.com/blog/conflicts-of-interest-grassroots-sport.md | Published by TidyHQ (https://tidyhq.com)