A taxonomy of national sport federations based on their financial profiles: the case of France's state-subsidized model.

Sport federations have a variety of financial profiles, even those operating within a single political context. In France, some federations depend on public funds, whereas others rely on private resources. Existing attempts to understand these differences have been based on just one criterion (Olympic sport or not). This paper draws on resource dependence theory in order to shed further light on this heterogeneity and provide a taxonomy of national sport federations. We analysed the financial profiles of 76 French sport federations during the period 2012–2017. After performing a principal component analysis to reduce the quantity of information, a linear discriminant analysis tests the relevance of differentiating between Olympic/non-Olympic federations. Finally, k-means method is used to conduct a taxonomic analysis and to identify 10 clusters. Five clusters contain non-Olympic federations ("deficient", "focused on elite sport", "non-professionalized", "focused emergent", "elitist"). The others contained Olympic federations ("traditional", "elite federations on life support", "rich network dependent", "powerful mono-dependent", "broad based"). This taxonomic analysis enables to assess financial vulnerability factors for each cluster, notably its dependence on specific resources. The findings will help the public authorities tailor the support they provide to the characteristics of the federations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]