Idrottens finansiering och crowdfunding : En kvalitativ studie hur idrottsorganisationerna finansieras och hur upplever samt anpassar sig idrottsorganisationerna till crowdfunding?

Background - Swedish sports organizations often struggle to gain financial income, due to reasons such as the 51% rule within Swedish sport, not obtaining enough financial income internally through the organization and the loss of earnings from the Covid-19 pandemic and other economic fluctuations. Therefore this study was conducted to analyze and describe how Swedish sport organizations seek financial help externally to be able to finance their organizations. Where the organizations network status was examined to see the potential external help they could benefit from and how the usage of crowdfunding could be an alternative for the organizations to gather financial help. Purpose - The purpose of this study is to analyze and describe how sports organizations finance themselves. Method - The way in which the study was performed, was through a qualitative method with an abductive approach. Through six semi structured interviews with representatives from the Swedish sports organizations the empirical data was collected. Then analyzed in relation to theories and previous research by a thematic analysis. Findings - The findings of this study suggest that Swedish sports organizations tend to prioritize their internally generated financial amounts of capital to finance their organizations through traditional financial methods such as: membership fees, sponsorship income, ticket sales, public support and in addition some organizations earned capital through player sales. Rather than reaching out to external financial investors, where crowdfunding was seen as a potential financial method to gather financial support. The Swedish sports organizations considered it to be important to engage and maintain their networks for this type of financial gathering method to be functionable.