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Philip Sinner
© Lukgood

Presentation by ZeMKI member Dr. Philip Sinner at the annual conference of the dvs section Sports Sociology 2024: Sports Sociology as a Crisis Science

26. April 2024

On 26 April 2024, ZeMKI member Dr Philip Sinner and the CoKoMeV team will give a presentation entitled “The communicative figuration of mediatized grassroot sports. Communicative strategies of Austrian and German sports clubs in response to the Covid-19 crisis”. The conference will take place from 25 to 27 April 2024 at TU Darmstadt. The conference theme focuses on the key concept of crisis as a description of the present day. Whether “refugee crisis”, “corona crisis”, “climate crisis”, “crisis of democracy” or “Russian crisis” – many things become uncertain in a state of crisis. The following applies to sport as a social domain: it has always been familiar with crises. From its very origins, it has functioned as a social domain that specifically counters the collateral damage of modern society through its diverse health, fun, play, adventure and vitality offerings, making it susceptible to crises in a paradoxical way. In the context of the „Covid-19 society”, sport’s special features have become its Achilles’ heel. Not only because social gatherings of people in sport were now considered a risk, but also because sport was categorised as not “systemically relevant”, it largely fell victim to virologically dominated crisis management.

In this context, the joint presentation by Jörg-Uwe Nieland, Philip Sinner, Christiana Schallhorn, Daniel Nölleke, Thomas Hory and Christof Seeger provides insights how Austrian and German grassroots sports clubs have sought and found solutions over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic in order to respond to the constantly changing conditions and fulfil their social responsibility. Two challenges proved to be central: 1) preserving the existence of the club and 2) providing members with training and competition opportunities even in times of graduated contact restrictions. Shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic began, an absolute majority of clubs still considered digitalisation measures to be unimportant. This view has changed fundamentally within a few weeks. However, the clubs had to set up media infrastructures and develop target-oriented internal and external communication strategies within a very short period of time. Only in the second and third year of the pandemic these strategies were largely established and the clubs were able to start thinking about the digitalisation of their club communication in the medium and long term. While media-mediated training and competitions were largely discontinued after the end of the pandemic, many clubs retained once-established internal communication channels and a (partially) digitalised administration.

With the energy crisis and the integration of refugees, grassroots sports clubs in Austria and Germany are once again facing major challenges.  As actors, they must also react to this in terms of communication and adapt their communicative practices to the new conditions. The long-term view of the overall study makes it possible to empirically trace the changes in the communicative figuration of mediatized grassroots sport.

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