Flemish sports clubs are increasingly hitting their limits in terms of infrastructure. Ageing buildings and insufficient resources mean many are turning away children who want to join.
More than 1.4 million Flemish people are members of a sports club, and compared to ten years ago, more than 13% of additional athletes joined a sports club in Flanders. Still, there are long waiting lists in many clubs. A survey by the Flemish Sports Federation, the umbrella organisation of sports federations, shows this is largely due to failing infrastructure.
"Despite investments, the accommodations do not grow enough with the membership numbers. An estimated half of the infrastructure was built in the 1970s or earlier. Barely a sixth date from after 2000," said Pieter Hoof, general director of the Flemish Sports Federation. "As a result, more and more clubs are hitting their limits."
Four out of ten clubs (39%) of sports clubs in the region responded in the survey that they urgently need extra infrastructure to get rid of waiting lists and membership stops. This is true both for indoor and outdoor sports.
Opening up existing infrastructure
Many clubs are unable to address their outdated infrastructure or lack of space because they rent their infrastructure from their municipality, for example, and cannot themselves decide to expand or renovate. "And of the clubs that can make independent decisions about their infrastructure, 60% do not have sufficient resources," Hoof said.
The federation argued that structural increased funding is urgently needed to address this problem in the long term, for which it is looking to local and regional governments. It called on both to provide more space for sports and to invest more in the construction of new sports infrastructure, renovation of existing accommodations and reallocation of unused buildings.
It noted that public-private partnerships can also be a solution. Meanwhile, one in six Flemish sports clubs want to use school buildings even more outside school hours as there are often sufficient facilities and space there.
