Until the end of March, Play the Game’s staff will work from home, but communication efforts and project management will continue as planned.

Backed by Erasmus+ funds, a coalition of European athlete representatives and academics will map existing structures of athlete representation and try to develop new ones over the next three years. Play the Game acts as the coordinator of the project.

When partners in the SAPIS project met in Denmark in February, they expressed great hopes for the outcomes of the project as the need for empowering athletes and ensuring their voices are heard in sports organisations is pressing.

Two out of three participants at Play the Game 2019 rated the conference experience in Colorado Springs as ‘very good’, the top mark in the anonymous survey. The internal evaluation is now available at playthegame.org.

For the first time, the International Partnership Against Corruption in Sport invited all nations of the world to join in. While other stakeholders are still kept outside, governments now seem to be engaging more in fighting corruption inside and around the organisations that run sport.

Play the Game/the Danish Institute for Sports Studies is recruiting an academic researcher who will contribute to developing the professional profile of the institute and strengthening our international leadership role within the governance of sport.

Analysis: In 2013, then-FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke stated that “less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup”. He reasoned that a “strong head of state” reduces organisational costs. Economist Matthias Fett looks at the numbers and tests this hypothesis.

Play the Game calls upon potential partners to declare their interest in hosting Play the Game 2021, the 12th world communication conference on sport and society.

Public and athlete support for the 2020 Olympic Games is waning but the IOC still hesitates to make the decision to cancel the mega-event in Tokyo because of the coronavirus pandemic. Investigative reporter Jens Weinreich explains what is going on inside the IOC right now.

At a preliminary hearing in Portugal in January 2020, the man behind Football Leaks, Rui Pinto, was characterised as a blackmailer rather than a whistleblower. If the charges lead to conviction, the media's role in publishing the documents should be scrutinised, writes Andreas Selliaas.

IOC President Thomas Bach made it very clear in his New Year’s speech that politics should be kept out of the Olympics to protect the event’s neutrality. However, it is a paradox that IOC’s characterisation of politicisation only seems to apply to athletes and not the host nations, writes Play the Game’s analyst Stanis Elsborg.

It was not primarily the athletes that drove the radical change of the sports agenda in the decade we leave. But there are signs that athletes will be at the heart of the agenda of the 2020’ies, writes Play the Game’s international director in a wind-up of ten turbulent years in world sport.

At the start of 2019, it was fair to say there was no single transnational anti-mega-event movement. In a matter of months, this changed as anti-Olympics organisers from Rio de Janeiro, Pyeongchang and Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, and Los Angeles came together in Tokyo in July with the goal of solidifying their transnational connections into an active movement against the Olympic Games.

The Director of Legal & Business affairs of the IAAF has asked Play the Game to share the federation’s viewpoints in response to a debate about the Caster Semenya case at Play the Game 2019.

As Play the Game 2019 comes to an end, a group of athlete organisations sends an open letter to IOC President Thomas Bach to bring attention to the important issue of human rights.

"Implementing and practice good governance in your organization means that people got to change. And I don't believe everyone understand the need for change. Or simply want a change," WADA Vice President Linda Helleland said at Play the Game 2019

"The history of sport organizations has demonstrated an ingrained reluctance to ask obvious questions or to challenge officials whose conduct has been inadequate or improper," said Richard W. Pound in his presentation at Play the Game 2019.

Opening address at the 11th international Play the Game conference, 13 October 2019 in Colorado Springs, USA, by Jens Sejer Andersen, international director of Play the Game.