The Role of Professional Sport Leagues within Sport Development

Professional sport leagues play an important, if perhaps underappreciated, function within sport development systems. This entry focuses on exploring the role of professional leagues within sport development systems. Notably, the financial resources that are associated with professional sport leagues can yield sport development outcomes that often cannot be replicated in elite (i.e. highperformance) sports that do not have professional sport leagues. Central to this is the financial remuneration and associated support provided to athletes, which contracts athletes and allows them to focus on their sport career. By contrast, athletes in semi- or non-professional settings must grapple with greater career duality to maintain financial and employment security, creating inherent resourcing trade-offs that may ultimately impact high performance and the longevity of their sport careers. Additionally, the competitive nature of professional sport leagues results not only in greater investment in highperformance infrastructure for athletes, but also in the surrounding workforce such as in talent attraction and retention. Investment in high-performance technology, which continues to advance, is allowing wealthier professional sport leagues to better optimise athlete performance and wellbeing. By contrast, national sport organisations with less professionalised elite sport environments are more likely to be characterised by greater athlete self-reliance, self-sacrifice, and volunteer labour. Finally, while professional sport leagues make evident contributions in the context of elite sport, so too can they yield sport development benefits in respect to mass participation. Although the trickle-down effect remains a contentious phenomenon, professional sport leagues retain some capacity to offer a role modelling benefit at the community sport level and pathways to careers in sport.