FROM COMPLIANCE TO CULTURE: A GROUNDBREAKING FRAMEWORK FOR SAFEGUARDING IN SPORT

Michele Colucci and Stefano Bastianon’s comprehensive safeguarding framework transforms athlete protection from compliance checkbox to cultural imperative. This open-source resource provides sports organizations with concrete implementation pathways, comparative international models, and survivor-centered approaches for building genuine safeguarding systems.

Executive Summary

“Protecting the Beauty of the Game: Towards a Safeguarding Culture” represents a watershed moment in sports integrity literature. Edited by Michele Colucci and Stefano Bastianon and published by the Sports Law and Policy Centre in 2025, this comprehensive volume—available free as an open-source resource—assembles practitioners and scholars from international federations, national systems, survivor advocacy, psychology, pedagogy, and sports governance into what reads like a comparative law casebook crossed with an implementation manual.

For the Sports Conflict Institute audience—ombuds and mediators, arbitrators, ethics and integrity officers, team and league executives, coaches, and athlete advocates—this volume offers something rare: a rigorous map of what a safeguarding culture actually looks like, how different jurisdictions operationalize it, and where the fault lines remain. The editors’ candid acknowledgment that this represents a “moment in time” rather than an endpoint reflects both intellectual honesty and practical wisdom about this rapidly evolving field.

This analysis examines why “Protecting the Beauty of the Game” stands as essential reading for sports organizations serious about safeguarding. The discussion proceeds in three parts: first, understanding the book’s comprehensive framework and comparative methodology; second, extracting practical implementation guidance from international case studies; and finally, applying the ten cross-cutting principles to organizational transformation efforts.

The editors establish their thesis with crystalline clarity: safeguarding cannot be a compliance bolt-on but must represent a cultural shift grounded in human rights, independence, accountability, and survivor-centered, trauma-informed practice.¹ This framing challenges the performative compliance that characterizes too many organizational approaches, where policies exist on paper while cultures remain unchanged. The volume’s structure—moving from global frameworks through national implementations to cultural underpinnings—mirrors the journey organizations must take from regulatory compliance to genuine transformation.

Part I’s examination of global frameworks reveals how child rights, integrity, and health instruments anchor sport safeguarding even when “sport” is not explicit. The international legal overview—spanning UNCRC, UNESCO’s Sport Charter, Council of Europe conventions, and EU sport competence—demonstrates that safeguarding obligations arise from multiple legal sources, not singular sport-specific mandates.² This multiplicity creates both opportunity and complexity: organizations cannot claim absence of clear standards, yet must navigate overlapping jurisdictions and evolving expectations.

The federation case studies provide unusually concrete implementation examples that move beyond aspirational language. FIBA’s “Whole Sport, Whole Organisation” policy with SPOC training and a Safeguarding Council demonstrates systematic embedding across governance levels. FIFA Foundation’s Safe Football Support Unit operates as a survivor-support, non-investigatory gateway functioning in real time—a critical distinction that preserves both support and due process.³ UEFA’s child safeguarding policy, national safeguarding officer network, multilingual e-learning, and event-specific protocols show how federated systems can maintain standards while respecting local contexts.

Part III’s focus on psychological safety as a condition precedent to safeguarding represents a crucial insight often missing from compliance-focused approaches. The concluding chapter, authored by survivor-leaders, emphasizes co-production—”nothing about us, without us”—as both normative requirement and efficacy condition, not courtesy.⁴ This integration throughout the volume, including in education and training synthesis, credits athlete-survivor advocacy with reshaping curricula, delivery, and credibility in ways that top-down mandates never could achieve alone.

Case Illustration: Germany’s Code for Reappraisal

Germany’s “Code for Reappraisal” pairs retrospective inquiry with prospective reform, creating an institutional reckoning model that embeds restorative justice and oversight. This approach acknowledges past failures while building future safeguards, arguably setting a benchmark for organizational accountability.

Part II’s comparative national analysis provides the volume’s analytical core, examining mature yet imperfect models alongside emerging systems. Canada and the United States demonstrate independent authority structures: Canada’s UCCMS/SDRCC tribunals transitioning to CCES administration maintain clear separation between prevention, investigation, adjudication, and appeals.⁵ The U.S. Center for SafeSport’s statutory jurisdiction, biennially updated Code, MAAPP (Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policies), annual NGB audits, centralized disciplinary database, and growing emphasis on collaboration show evolution from crisis response to systematic prevention.

Australia’s Sport Integrity Australia and National Integrity Framework demonstrate coherent “single front door” intake design, though deliberately limited remit creates jurisdictional seams the authors identify as improvement opportunities.⁶ The UK’s linkage of safeguarding to funding compliance provides a pragmatic lever for closing resource gaps at grassroots levels—a design principle applicable across resource-constrained contexts. Italy and Portugal’s statutory mandates and observatories showcase how governmental frameworks can drive systematic change, while Belgium, France, and Spain illustrate persistent coordination challenges in decentralized systems.

The editors extract ten cross-cutting principles that transcend jurisdictional variations: integrity, independence and impartiality, accountability, transparency, accessibility and inclusivity, confidentiality balanced with duty to act, survivor-centered and trauma-informed design, prevention and proportionality, and continuous learning culture.⁷ These principles surface repeatedly across successful implementations, suggesting universal applicability despite contextual differences. The volume’s honesty about persistent gaps—fragmentation in federated systems, inconsistent data collection, resource constraints, cultural resistance, and trust deficits where safeguarding officers lack perceived independence—enhances rather than undermines its authority.

Implementation mechanics receive unusual attention, distinguishing this from purely theoretical treatments. The IOC Games-time framework section details conduct standards, “active listening,” multi-channel reporting, role clarity between NOC Welfare Officers and IOC Safeguarding Officers, documentation protocols, and disciplinary pathways—the procedural specificity that transforms policy into operational reality.⁸ FIBA’s SPOC course and toolkit demonstrate how to operationalize “safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility” through empowered focal points with action plans, communications strategies, and referral mapping—design principles Sports Conflict Institute practitioners will recognize from ombuds and employee assistance programs.

Ten Cross-Cutting Safeguarding Principles

For Sports Conflict Institute’s practitioner community, the book’s utility extends beyond academic analysis to practical application. Organizations can use it as a benchmarking instrument: aligning safeguards against the ten principles, testing reporting channels against the IOC framework, assessing cultural work using psychological safety chapters, and auditing evaluation loops using Canada/Italy/Portugal exemplars.⁹ The comparative sections on independence, access, confidentiality exceptions, and appeal mechanics offer ready heuristics for arbitrators, mediators, and ombuds fashioning process orders or settlement architecture.

The volume functions as a policy design guide for drafting or revising codes, MAAPP-style contact rules, travel and lodging protocols, and federation-to-club delegation agreements. The treatment of evaluation and institutional learning provides refreshingly specific guidance: Canada’s publication of anonymized statistics, Italian and Portuguese observatories’ data pipelines, IOC’s incorporation of safeguarding indicators into governance monitoring, and Australia’s analytical frameworks all model the “measure–learn–adapt” loop that transforms policies into systems.¹⁰ This emphasis on continuous improvement distinguishes sustainable safeguarding from performative compliance.

Two elements deserve particular attention from governance professionals. First, the balance between due process and trauma-informed practice captures essential tensions: federation chapters investing in independent intake, confidentiality with duty-to-act, respondent rights, clear timelines, and support services exhibit the equilibrium preventing either credibility or fairness from being sacrificed. Second, situating safeguarding within broader integrity architecture—anti-doping, match manipulation, corruption—reinforces that abuse of power represents both safeguarding failure and corruption modality, suggesting integrated rather than siloed approaches.

The policy proposal for a UNESCO safeguarding convention represents ambitious yet logical evolution. The argument’s crisp logic—existing treaties address doping, manipulation, and event safety while abuse lacks dedicated binding instruments—suggests safeguarding’s maturation from emerging concern to established pillar of sports integrity.¹¹ Whether feasible or not, the proposal crystallizes the field’s trajectory toward universal standards, independence requirements, and survivor-centered practice as non-negotiable elements rather than best practices.

Organizational Implementation Priorities

“Protecting the Beauty of the Game” achieves what few edited volumes manage: comprehensive breadth without sacrificing practical depth. Michele Colucci, Stefano Bastianon, and their contributors have created the definitive reference for safeguarding implementation, one that belongs on every sports administrator’s desk and in every governance professional’s library. The decision to make this resource freely available as open-source material reflects the editors’ commitment to universal access and systemic change rather than academic gatekeeping.

The volume’s measured tone, careful sourcing, and willingness to surface tensions rather than smooth them over creates trustworthy guidance for navigating safeguarding’s complexities. The editors repeatedly acknowledge tradeoffs—centralized independence versus sector ownership, rapid scaling versus quality assurance, transparency versus privacy—that make this work challenging. This intellectual honesty, combined with concrete implementation examples, transforms what could be aspirational rhetoric into actionable framework.

For organizations serious about safeguarding, this volume provides both mirror and map: a mirror reflecting current inadequacies and a map toward genuine cultural transformation. Read the executive summary for strategic framing, federation chapters for operational baselines, national chapters matching your context for regulatory mechanics, and Part III for culture and pedagogy. Then use page 37’s priority wheel to drive your implementation agenda. In an era where safeguarding failures continue making headlines, “Protecting the Beauty of the Game” offers the comprehensive framework sports needs to move from crisis response to systematic prevention.

Sources

Note: All citations follow Bluebook format. For questions about specific citations, consult The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed. 2020).

About the Author

Joshua A. Gordon serves as Professor of Sports Business & Law at the University of Oregon and Senior Practitioner at the Sports Conflict Institute, specializing in governance, safeguarding, and dispute resolution systems. Read full bio →

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