The free standing sports association : How can external revenue sources affect sports associations

The Swedish sport movement is built on voluntary engagement and strong autonomy, and is Sweden's largest popular movement. To help finance sports, the government annually provides state financial support. The idea of the support is to promote sport for the entire swedish population, trusting the Swedish sport movement to manage the course of action. The financial support is important to enable Swedish sport to maintain its independence. Research has shown that the government and otherexternal financiers lately has grown an increased interest to involve and affect Swedish sport, using financial means to do so. Researchers fear that this will challenge the autonomy of the Swedish sportmovement. Leading to the purpose of this study, to see on a grassroot level how sport organisations witness this conflict of interest between external financiers and thus the effect on the Swedish sport movements autonomy. To answer this, the study is based on (qualitative) interviews made with 7 sportclubs within the municipality of Umeå. Results show that all interviewed sport clubs experience positive use of using external financiation. However these sport clubs do not seem to characterize the effects just as problematic as former research suggests. On the contrary, the sport clubs declare themselves as free to structure their activities without disturbing involvement from external financiers. Where the organizational governance is stronger than the systemic. A final conclusion is that smaller sport clubs in Umeå do not experience this conflict of interest between external financiers and their own activities. They feel free to plan their activities based on the clubs internal driving forces, where external finances rather creates opportunities for the clubs to grow