According to a report by Statistics Austria, children (6-15 years) are the most active group in sports clubs in Austria. Every third child is enrolled in a club. The Austrian Football Association(OEFB) alone lists at least 1,800 football clubs.
To increase the number of children that engage in regular physical activities, sports clubs need funding. But where to put the money to have the greatest possible impact? Find out with a simple simulation game.
It visualizes three principles discovered in a research project that intended to support policy-making and put the Austrian sports funding system on evidence-based grounds.
The influence of a club’s total income.
The influence of a location’s socioeconomic characteristic.
The return on your investment.
In October 2021, Jan Hurt and Peter Klimek from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna introduced an agent-based model (ABM) that aims to provide data-driven decision support for the Austrian funding system for sports clubs.
They developed the so-called club size function, which provides a quantitative understanding for how different demographic, socio-economic, and budgetary factors relate to the number of members of a sports club. The club size function allows to simulate counterfactual scenarios that describe how changes in funding can be expected to impact the number children as club members.
This game uses the data gathered and models built during that research. Memberships and locations of the football clubs were gathered from the club-webpages of the OEFB. Income of each club was estimated from a representative survey by the Sports Econ Austria (SpEA). Demographic and socioeconomic data of the districts is made available by the Statistik Austria.
The models and its statements are highly dependent on the quality and granularity of the available data. Concrete statements, e.g. regarding the influence of the socioeconomic indicators, made in this game should therefor be taken with a "grain of salt". More details regarding the reliability can be read in the reports.