At a time when most CSR budgets are under severe pressure, you’d have thought professional sports clubs and leagues would be retrenching too.
Not according to the evidence at Westminster this week, when the editor of SportsBusiness, Miriam Sherlock, and a panel of judges including Derek Wyatt MP, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Rugby Group.
The investment in cash, kind and time being made by the 12 Guinness Premiership clubs is actually up over last year and the infrastructure is expanind: the clubs now have 100 community officers (FTE) and are pumping over 100,000 hours into community programming.
According to Wyatt, a shareholder at Charlton, professional rugby now matches all bar ‘one or two’ of the football clubs, often regarded as the gold star in sports CSR for the size and quality of their programming. Sherlock was struck by the return on investment and the quality of the return for the sponsors involved.
To hear the judges directly go to: http://www.rugbyinthecommunity.com/
Oh, by the way. Saracens were voted ‘Community Club of the Year’, the top award.