July 27 – Sports integrity lobby group SIGA kept up its calls for better sports governance at its Lisbon forum with former IOC Marketing and Broadcasting Rights Director Michael Payne saying sport has to “adapt or die, but also adapt to thrive”.
The SIGA Sport Integrity Forum in Lisbon, the second edition of the meeting, focussed panels on governance and reform; financial integrity; sports betting integrity; protection of minors in sport; and a more generic sports business topic covering brand value and reputation.
Established formally as a legal entity in January, the Sports Integrity Global Alliance (SIGA), brings together a coalition of more than 80 international multi-industry supporters from “sport, governments, academia, international organisations, sponsors, business, rights holders, NGOs and professional services companies.”
SIGA holds its General Assembly today and as an organisation is still battling to establish a major role in the sports integrity ecosystem, particularly with sports federations who still maintain an element of sceptical distrust about its objectives.
Central to the SIGA proposition is to get stakeholders to sign up to its Universal Standards
which allows third party scrutiny of the level of compliance to those standards set by SIGA. The areas of compliance cover good governance, financial integrity and sport betting integrity. Sports federations have been slow to sign up to another layer of compliance, many of them concerned at the cost of that compliance rather than the integrity issues therein.
A SIGA statement after the forum said: “SIGA was created to act on this need for change and serve as a bridge for stakeholders across the sports industry. SIGA was established to assist sport and not compete or overshadow it. We do not want to police sport but to encourage it. There is no alternative; change will only be implemented through collective action. Today we have reinforced our commitment to this action and the belief that we not only have the solutions to the problems, but the power to enforce them.”
SIGA holds its closed doors General Assembly for its members in Lisbon today (Thursday).
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