Abstract
Within the United Kingdom (UK), sports volunteering is understood broadly as willingly giving up one’s free time to assist others in sport for no payment. It involves a very wide range of activities, contexts, and roles which are outlined in the chapter. It is widely accepted that volunteers are the “lifeblood” of sport, and approximately 15% of people in England (6.7 million) volunteered in sport at least once during 2016. The main context for sports volunteering is the sports club or community sports association (75% of sports volunteers). Sports event volunteering is becoming more visible but remains just a fraction of the overall volunteering activity in sport (1.3%). Overall volunteers are the main decision-makers in sport in the UK, although a professionalization agenda has increased the number of paid staff in larger, national organizations.
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Notes
- 1.
A comprehensive review of sport volunteering in the UK has recently been provided in Nichols (2017) which is a source of much of the information in this chapter.
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Reid, F., Findlay-King, L. (2018). United Kingdom. In: Hallmann, K., Fairley, S. (eds) Sports Volunteers Around the Globe. Sports Economics, Management and Policy, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02354-6_24
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