Slovenian sport is financed from three main sources: public expenditure provided by the state through the annual sports program and the Sports Foundation at the national level and local communities; population expenditure on sports products and services; and economic expenditure, which is mostly sponsorship in sports. Each company follows its own sponsorship strategy, with many areas and projects always competing with each other, deciding which areas to invest in (e.g., sports, culture, etc.) and assess their priorities and relationships with other investments. 2020 has been heavily marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a profound impact on the world and the economy, as well as on sports and sponsorships. Namely, sport is one of the forms of social activity in which the participants are physically close or even in contact at all times. These are athletes, coaches, masseurs, physiotherapists, and others, as well as spectators. Most Slovenian companies have decided to insist on sponsoring selected sports activities, but they also expect some sort of government assistance. This chapter explores the impact of COVID-19 on sponsorship Slovenian sports.
TopIntroduction
The National Assembly has confirmed a new national holiday in 2020, the day of Slovenian sport. Slovenians celebrated it for the first time on September 23, exactly 20 years after the Slovenian national anthem was played for the first time at the Olympic Games in Sydney in honour of rowers Iztok Čop and Luka Špik and sports shooter Rajmond Debevec. The holiday is dedicated to Slovenian sport and the promotion of sport in the broadest sense, with special emphasis on the fact that all Slovenes celebrate it with physical activity.
Organized sport is an important driver of the development and promotion of sport while preserving tradition, protecting values and the basic principles of sports participation. It also has the task of providing an appropriate and safe environment in which sports activities take place under professional guidance in such a way that each participant gets the opportunity to meet their potential or goals (Bizovičar, 2020b). Both professional and recreative sports are searching for sponsors, in order to provide suitable conditions for trainings and performances.
A sponsorship represents support, either financially or through products and services, that an individual or company provides to others. Certain sponsorship categories include: sports, entertainment, causes, arts, festivals, fairs and annual events, associations and membership organizations. Sponsorship spending, globally, has been nearing 70 billion USD yearly (Guttman, 2019). The cancellation of mass gatherings was one of the earliest measures implemented to combat the spread of Covid-19 – and that meant the sport and entertainment industry was one of the first and most severely hit. It has left rights holders contending with the financial implications of large and possibly complete reductions in revenue streams through decreased earnings in broadcast rights, sponsorship payments and match day operations (KPMG, 2020). Social lockdown was imposed, and the Olympics – and almost every other sporting contest you can think of – was postponed (Howarth, 2020). As WHO Director-General Tedros said (WHO, 2020), “The pandemic is a once-in-a-century health crisis, the effects of which will be felt for decades to come.” The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the sport sponsorship industry will have multiple consequences and, although these days most analyses focus on assessing the loss of income, it will also be necessary to take into account possible future investments required to manage the gradual return to a new normal (Denton, 2020).